I, the undersigned, Dora Bobory, candidate for the M.A. degree in Medieval Studies declare herewith that the present thesis is exclusively my own work, based on my research and only such external information as properly credited in notes and bibliography. I declare that no unidentified and illegitimate use was made of the work of others, and no part of the thesis infringes on any person’s or institution’s copyright. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree.

Budapest, 1 June 2002

______Signature CEU eTD Collection

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations i Introduction 1 I. The Sources of Renaissance Self-Consciousness 8 I. 1. Centrality of Man in the Hermetic Texts 8 I. 2. Melancholy, Genius, Divination 10 I. 2. 1. The Ancient Greek Tradition of Melancholy 11 I. 2. 2. The Middle Ages and a Different Attitude to the Same Question 18 I. 2. 3. Melancholy of Renaissance; Renaissance of Melancholy 21 I. 2. 4. Gerolamo Cardano: A Case Study of a Chosen One? 25

II. Image of the Self in the Autobiography 26

III. Self-Fashioning through the Scientific Works 44 III. 1. Introduction 44 III. 2. Signs of Being a Chosen One in the Scientific Corpus 46 III. 2. 1. Miracula and Mirabilia in the Encyclopedic Works 46 III. 2. 2. Cardano’s Melancholy 47 III. 2. 3. Divination and Self-Fashioning 49 III. 2. 4. Dreams and Demons 52 III. 3. Conclusion 56

Conclusion 59

Bibliography 70

CEU eTD Collection List of illustrations

Figure 1. Engraving of Albrecht Dürer, “Melencolia I” 21

Figure 2. Portrait of Gerolamo Cardano from the year 1557 (source unknown) 33

Figure 3. Emblema of Joannes Sambucus dedicated to Cardano 62

CEU eTD Collection

Introduction

In contrast to the generally accepted view that modern science, born or at least formed

in the Humanist Renaissance, met no substantial resistance, and thus simply swept

magic and superstition away from world history, Paolo Rossi claims that “the

Hermetic-magical tradition had an important influence on many of the leading

exponents of the Scientific Revolution... Today, the Enlightenment-era positivist

image of scientific knowledge marching triumphantly through the darkness and

superstition of magic has definitely been laid to rest.”1

There is another aspect to the Renaissance that must be clarified – that of the

role of solitary adventurers in the new fields of “science” (whether in a modern, or at

least proto-modern, sense, or their own), scholarly rather than scholastic, and indebted

to no tradition, only keen to share their new discoveries with their peers, often by

means of correspondence and personal visits rather than communal endeavour.

Although the romantic attitude of Burckhardt that viewed the Italian Renaissance as

the revolt of particular individuals against the darkness of the medieval heritage has

been successfully criticised, there is no question that there were important participants

of the intellectual sphere (and certainly that of art) who did not belong to

philosophical schools or institutions. These intellectuals were not necessarily

supported by powerful patrons; rather, they were scholars who made their own way

through the complex network of ideologies and traditions, following their own CEU eTD Collection

1 Paolo Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science tr. by C. De Nardi Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 26. This is the view of Steven Shapin as well, who states that "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution… Many historians are no longer satisfied that there was any singular and discrete event, localized in time and space, that can be pointed to as “the” Scientific Revolution. Such historians now reject even the notion that there was any single coherent cultural entity called “science” in the seventeenth century to undergo revolutionary change. There was, rather, a diverse array of cultural practises aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world, each with different characteristics and each experiencing different modes of change,” Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1-3.

1 presentiments while utilising – consciously or not – a great variety of sources and

thoughts. The fact that they stood outside the universities and traditional institutions

(even if they often had some temporary experience of them) on the one hand provided

them with a freedom of choice, while on the other it also meant that the sources and

ideas they made their own were not part of or rooted in the mainstream. “Scientific

activity was being carried on in an unstructured ideological framework wherein

everyone tried, with difficulty, to make his way, practising two or three disciplines at

once, teaching one but not the other, without any spirit of specialisation in the present-

day sense of the word.”2

The period this paper focuses on is the sixteenth century, the third generation

of Humanists, and as such it “no longer presented the exciting aspect of continuous

discovery, renewed year by year”3 by the publication of new materials and fresh

approaches: the new discoveries were no longer new; the anxiety the sensational

discovery of the Hermetic texts4 caused in the late fifteenth century was dying down.

Their presence became usual, similarly to other discoveries, both literary and

geographic; they became absorbed in that mass or complexity of traditions, cultures,

attitudes that now we call Renaissance.

The “new intellectuals,”5 or, as some of their contemporaries would simply

call them, sorcerers, magi, or even charlatans, were thus solitary figures without the

financial and social support a courtier could enjoy, and as a result they laboured under

CEU eTD Collection 2 Robert Mandrou, From Humanism to Science 1480-1700 tr. By Brian Pearce (Bungay, Suffolk: Penguin , 1978), 22. 3 Ibid., 138. 4 On the Hermetic tradition and its impact on Renaissance culture, see, Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964) which still represents the most trustworthy authority on this subject; Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Eugenio Garin, "Nota sull'ermetismo," in La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano. Ricerche e documenti (Florence: Sansoni, 1992), pages 143-154. 5 Mandrou, From Humanism to Science, 122.

2 the necessity of fighting their way up to the scholarly community unaided. In

consequence they had to create extremely strong “survival strategies” to find a public,

and more especially, a patron ready to support them. More often than not it was the

printer who took on the task of being the intermediary between the author and the

readers;6 consequently the market-forces played a very direct role in the publication,

as the response to a certain work was quite explicit and graspable – and of immediate

practical importance to a publisher. Thus raw business influenced the careers of all

intellectuals.

The “new intellectual” had to be a conscious, determined businessman who

knew how to sell his literary products, and shaped himself into whatever form was the

most required. “In the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-

consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful

process.”7 The matter of the ability to control one’s own identity (and, by extension

or at least by persuasion, that of others) played a decisive role in the person’s further

career: if one negotiated well enough among the capricious market-forces, one was

able to survive, or even to acquire fame and success with all that those factors imply:

wealth, recognition.

Some of these “new intellectuals” went further than simply embracing the

opportunities: they really believed that they were meant to do more than fulfil the

requirements of the readers, but to lead some kind of a mission. They felt themselves

initiated, chosen for knowing the secrets that others were not allowed or prepared or CEU eTD Collection able to know. The occult, the mysterious, the unexplainable was the borderline which

divided the masses from them, the ones chosen for the mission.

6 Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France tr. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), especially pages 145-182. 7 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.) 2.

3 Already in the 1960s Frances Yates drew the attention of scholars to the fact

that the Florentine Neoplatonist philosophers did not focus exclusively on the sublime

philosophy of Plato and other authorities of the same importance; a further and

similarly intriguing source of their ideology was the Hermetic corpus, a late

Hellenistic written tradition, a collection of occult and obscure writings.

The word “occult” has the meaning of something hidden, not available for

everyone, but the wise and virtuous: as Matthew said, “Do not give dogs what is holy,

and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn

to attack you.”8

In the time when astrology and the various branches of divinatory arts still

played an exceptional role in everyday life, the figure of the solitary scientist-magus,

isolated from the others since he was in possession of a higher knowledge, could

intrigue people more effectively. The nature of a secret consists in the constant

curiosity it causes: the singular secrets of nature, furthermore, are the steps that lead to

the final, ultimate secret, that is, life. One in possession of the knowledge of the

hidden, the occult could sense a more intimate relation to the divine. The “new

intellectual” engaged in the eager search for secrets while not having the institutional

background could easily get in trouble: the accusation of heresy was something that

Paracelsus, Agrippa, Della Porta, or even Campanella and Bruno were familiar with.

Their ideas in fact often fell between various categories or lay at the edge of

various discipline, occupying a queer liminal9 or marginal zone: the one between faith CEU eTD Collection and heresy, between science and magic or superstition, old and new, ancient and

modern, absolute nonsense and sensational novelty. The diversity of the sources they

could reach back to, and those they could make their own, was very intriguing: a good

8 Gospel of Matthew, 7:6

4 and wise choice could make someone famous and widely accepted, while a bad or ill-

considered step could exclude one from the scholarly community forever, even

earning one the title of “sorcerer,” “magus,” or “witch-master.” Thus the reader who

decides to study them has to be very cautious with the labels that are so easy to apply:

one must not think in terms of science and superstition in the modern sense of these

words, because there was a complicated nexus and interaction between the most

different fields of knowledge: alchemy was the forerunner of today’s chemistry; the

study of humours was not so very far from later (and still accepted) theories on the

blood or on the brain; astronomy and astrology were not two separate branches.

Since it is always easier to approach an epoch through the life and work of a

characteristic individual, this paper will focus on a very enigmatic and controversial

figure of the Italian Renaissance, one whose life and works reflect faithfully the

problems and difficulties a scholar in sixteenth-century Italy had to face. Such a one

is Gerolamo Cardano,10 whose worth is estimated by a respectable authority in the

following:

It seems to me that knowledge exerts magic that is comprehensible only to those who have been seized by it. I am not only referring to factual knowledge which is not concerned with the powers of reasoning, but rather that kind of

9 The term “liminal status” and “liminality” was introduced by Victor Turner, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), see especially pages 94-130. 10 Gerolamo Cardano was born in the year 1501 in Pavia. He graduated in Medicine and Arts at the age of 25 at the university of Padua, but his illegitimate birth impeded him from being accepted into the College of Physicians in Milan for many years, thus he could not practise his profession officially. He was a man of universal interests, who dealt with mathematics, moral and natural philosophy, and botany, contributing to each branch of science. In some of the cases he performed something really outstanding (in the field of mathematics, the demonstration of the method for the solution of cubic

CEU eTD Collection equations, or a special suspension, designed for the carriage of the Emperor Charles V, the so-called “joint” of Cardano), while in other cases his role is not easy to define. There is, furthermore, a growing interest shown towards the works of Cardano: from year to year there is someone who aims at exploring one of the numerous fields of knowledge he was involved in. In relation to his medicine, see Nancy G. Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); on his astrology Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). There are also great collections of articles on his work, such as Eckhard Keßler, ed. Girolamo Cardano: Philosoph, Naturforscher, Arzt (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994); M. Baldi and G. Canziani, eds. Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Milano 11-13 dicembre 1997 (Milan: Francoangeli, 1999).

5 knowledge which Cardano possessed. He was a truly great man, despite his misconceptions. If not for them, he would have been unequalled.11

Leibniz’s estimation is a high one; he is truly impressed. This is all the more

interesting as it is not simply a comment from one mathematician-philosopher

(famous for his work on calculus) on another – Leibniz is not referring to Cardano’s

mathematical skills, but to something more occult, something very unlike Leibniz’s

own rationalist philosophy. Still he remains impressed. And yet he states that

Cardano had misconceptions. In this thesis, I shall attempt not to trace and castigate

those misconceptions, with the dubious benefit of five hundred-odd years of

hindsight, but rather approach the question of Cardano’s beliefs through his individual

career. Individual, that is, in at least three senses: particular, solitary, and not a little

eccentric. This is important: Cardano was self-consciously isolated, and indeed took

an odd melancholy pride in this. That confluence of pride and melancholy (not pride

in melancholy) was both his reaction to his status and (or at least so he believed) its

root cause.

In the following, I intend to examine the means and modes this particular

scholar used for the various purposes one needed to reach in order to acquire fame

and earn a livelihood in the scholarly world. The research will focus mainly on the

traditions which indicated a possible connection between physiological phenomena

and purely spiritual capacities, and the way some scholars utilised them to accentuate

their uniqueness, or even to support by well-known authorities their claim to be

chosen ones. Through the analysis of Cardano’s efforts aiming at the creation of the CEU eTD Collection

11 “Die Wissenschaft und Gelehrsamkeit scheint dergleichen Anmut zu haben, die von Leuten, die sie niemals geschmeckt, nicht kann begriffen werden. Ich verstehe nicht ein bloßes historisches Wissen, ohne die Erkenntnis der Gründe; sondern ein solches Wissen, wie Cardan seines, der bei allen seinen Fehlern in der Tat ein großer Mann war: und ohne diese Fehler unvergleichlich würde gewesen sein,” in Leibniz, Theodicee Herrn Gottfried Wilhelms Freiherrn von Leibniz (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1996), 260. Translated by Helga Niman in Markus Fierz, Girolamo Cardano 1501-1576. Physician,

6 image of himself as a chosen one with special abilities, I will try to show how the raw

market-forces challenged him and his fellow scholars to perform (or at least claim to

do so) something outstanding and often astonishingly bold in the scientific world.

First a brief overview of concepts and traditions present from the fifteenth to the end

of the sixteenth century Italy will be provided in this thesis, then I turn to analyse the

concrete case of Gerolamo Cardano, by proof-reading his autobiography and

highlighting particular moments of his scientific works.

CEU eTD Collection

Natural Philosopher, Mathematician, Astrologer, and Interpreter of Dreams (Basle-Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1983), 175.

7 I. The Sources of Renaissance Self-Consciousness

Medium te mundi posui, ut circumspiceres inde comodius quicquid est in mundo. Nec te celestem neque terrenum, neque mortalem neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque plastes et fictor, in quam malueris tute formam effingas. Poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare; poteris in superiora quae sunt divina ex tui animi sententia regenerari… O summam Dei patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis foelicitatem! Cui datum id habere quod optat, id esse quod velit.

Pico della Mirandola, Oratio de Dignitate Hominis12

I. Centrality of Man in the Hermetic Texts

The words above, taken from Pico’s On the Dignity of Man, reflect very faithfully the

pride and self-consciousness which were so characteristic of the Renaissance ideal of

man. This is an image of a man who takes his destiny in his own hands: instead of

being a passive subject of God’s will, he becomes an active creator in his own right.

Magnum miraculum, o Asclepi, est homo! – thus runs the favourite motto of the

Florentine Neoplatonists, attributed to a certain Hermes (or Mercurius) Trimegistus

(‘Thrice-greatest’), the supposed author of various dialogues which – due to an error

of dating – were considered contemporaneous to the revelation of Moses. The texts

were brought to Italy by a Macedonian monk, and were immediately paid special

attention, so much that Cosimo de’ Medici ordered Marsilio Ficino to put Plato aside

for a while and translate Trismegistus’ work instead, because he wanted to read them

before he died. The texts were divided into two major parts: the Asclepius (which has

come down to us in Latin) and the Pimander (or Corpus Hermeticum, which has CEU eTD Collection survived in Greek).13 Ficino was impressed first of all by the Asclepius concerning

12 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De dignitate hominis, Eugenio Garin, ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1942). 13 On the reception of the magical elements of the Hermetic tradition in the Renaissance, apart from Yates, see Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (8 vols.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923-1958).

8 two points.14 One was the part that accentuated man’s centrality in the universe, his

power, his importance, his potential greatness. The other one was the idea that man

himself can become a creator. These are ideas15 that – according to György Endre

Szőnyi – can easily be considered as the framework of the theory of exaltatio, the

magical process of man’s re-divinization.

The Renaissance Italian Neoplatonists argued – as opposed to the medieval

understanding, which imagined ascension of the soul towards the celestial realm only

after the individual’s terrestrial career – that it is possible here on earth to reach the

ancient state of innocence, which characterised men before the Fall. Ficino believed

that some men are chosen ones, with the capacity to take their destiny in their own

hands, to reach the state of perfection and to share in omnipotence and omniscience

with God. “The Mind in men is God, and for this cause some of mankind are gods,

and their humanity is nigh unto divinity.”16

What are the features of these chosen ones? How can someone approximate

to this ideal state of mind? The questions of the criteria to be satisfied in order to be

recognised as a chosen one were very important. The Italian Neoplatonists –

following their favourite Plato in this regard, too – all agree that purity of the soul is a

basic requirement, just as is the study of divine things. This, then, accounts for the

status of the chosen one – it explains how such a status may be attained, consciously

and with effort, and it also explains why it is that some individuals may naturally

approximate to such a condition. However, it does not answer a more prosaic CEU eTD Collection

14 György Endre Szőnyi, ‘Exaltatio’ és hatalom. Keresztény mágia és okkult szimbolizmus egy angol mágus műveiben (Exaltation and Power. Christian Magic and Occult Symbolism in the Works of a Renaissance Magus) (Szeged: JatePress, 1998), 102. 15 It is true, however, that there are some parts in the Hermetic corpus which represent a negative attitude toward humanity and the cosmos. The dialogue entitled In God Alone is Good and Elsewhere Nowhere, for instance, is a reminder that these documents are relics of a diverse and not necessarily consistent school of thought. On the distinction between positive and negative gnosis, see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 22. 16 Corpus Hermeticum, XII. ‘About the Common Mind’, 1, translated by G. R. S. Mead.

9 epistemological – and indeed social – question: how is such a status to be verified

empirically? How is it to be recognised? Is it – to use a more modern term –

veridical?

In some cases the chosen one was recognisable by physical features and

unusual behaviour, too: a look always fixed on the ground, constant meditation over

the greatest questions of life and death, isolation from the rest of the world, and so on.

With the physical and psychological description of the chosen one, we are now

entering a rather unusual field of particular interest from the point of view of this

research.

II. Melancholy, Genius, Divination

There is a direct reference to the Hermetic texts and their influence in the

Renaissance, and especially in the Florentine Neoplatonic circle whose greatest

exponents were Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. It is no secret

that they used those sources openly, by quoting them and utilising their ideas in their

own work; however, as I have mentioned, there is also the tradition of melancholy,17 a

more elusive set of principles and criteria, which served for Renaissance scholars –

and now I even have to narrow down the research basically to Italy – as justification

for the consciousness of their position, both as central to the cosmos and as aware of

their centrality.

We have seen that science and spiritual purity were considered to be means of CEU eTD Collection bringing some chosen ones closer to divinity, or even raise man from the terrestrial to

17 Concerning the part on the history of melancholy, I am heavily indebted to the great book of Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964).

10 the celestial realm in the earthly life, by means of the Platonic frenzies,18 and magic as

an alternative.

Nevertheless, these are means that could be – at least theoretically –

appropriated by anyone meeting certain preliminary conditions (purity of the soul and

devotion to science, for instance). In this tradition man has an emphatically elective

role: he is presented with the choice to reach to a higher level, to approach the most-

desired perfection, the absolute knowledge, while he is also granted the possibility to

leave all these things out of consideration, to live happily (or not) under the

circumstances given him by God. In the course of the following pages we will see

that the tradition of melancholy implies a completely non-elective way of reaching a

higher state of mind, a gift or a burden (depending on the point of view and the

interpretation in different epochs and scientific circles, as we shall see later) that one

is provided with by nature. However, even a non-elective feature, such as the

melancholy character, could contribute to the creation of an image of the chosen one

in the Renaissance, if someone found adequate sources to rely on and refer to as

authority in that respect.

1. The Ancient Greek Tradition of Melancholy

 τ πντες σοι περιττο γεγόνασιν νδρες  κατ φιλοσοφίαν  πολιτικν 

ποίησιν  τέχνας φαίνονται μελαγχολικο ντες; – Thus runs the very important

question of pseudo-Aristotle19 in his Problemata Physica (953a).20 The term CEU eTD Collection

18 Plato describes four different frenzies in his Symposion: (1) religious frenzy, (2) prophetic frenzy, (3) frenzy of love, and (4) poetic frenzy. While the first two types imply a rather passive attitude, the latter two suggest a more active participation on the part of the subject. 19 In fact it derives most probably from Theophrastus (Greek peripatetic philosopher, the favourite pupil of Aristotle and his immediate successor in the leadership of the Lyceum), the author who – according to Diogenes Laertius – first wrote a book on melancholy. That book was lost, and public opinion from Antiquity onwards attributed this work to Aristotle. The author is very often referred to as pseudo-Aristotle.

11 ‘melancholy’ derives from  χολ (‘black bile’) which was not considered

something belonging exclusively to the body: on the contrary, it originated from the

body but was transferred to the spiritual realm and to the whole cosmos.21 This

treatise of pseudo-Aristotle represents the first instance when melancholy, a physical

symptom of an excess of black bile, is linked to the abstractions of singularity and

excellence, and this idea, very interestingly, both became extremely popular in the

eyes of posterity and provoked constant controversies among scholars, philosophers,

physicians.

In the fifth century BC, in his De Natura Hominis,22 Hippocrates describes the

four humours and makes them responsible for the person’s health, accentuating the

importance of the κρασία (‘mixture’) of those humours. Even he agreed that

melancholy in itself is not an illness,23 but becomes that only in case of δυσκρασία

(‘bad mixture’). In fact, the origin is purely physical,24 while the consequence is far

more spiritual or psychological.

Indeed, according to Hippocrates, melancholy is the result of a certain slip in

the usual order of the universe, since on the basis of the cosmocentric attitude of the

Greeks, man as the microcosm was an organic part of the macrocosm, not something

20 The passage on melancholy is quoted entirely in Greek by Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl. Here, as elsewhere in this paper, I shall refer to the Italian translation of the English original, Saturno e la melanconia (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), tr. by Renzo Federici, in lack of the original, 21 – 23. 21 For a better understanding of interdependence between man and cosmos the book of Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl provide a brief summary of three basic principles of the Greeks). Throughout the

CEU eTD Collection combination, in fact, of a need (1) to trace the apparently complex structure of the macrocosm and the microcosm back to primary and simple elements, (2) to find a numerical expression for this complex corporeal and spiritual system, and finally (3) to place all the phenomena in the framework of harmony, symmetry, and isonomy, one could more easily grasp the importance of the characterisation of man by four primary humours. 22 Corpus Hippocraticum, E. Littré, ed. (Paris, 1839-1861). 23 Around the fourth century BC we find the illness called “melancholy” to be characterised by essentially psychological alterations in a wide range, from a simple fear or phobia throughout misanthropy until depression and madness. Due to the influence of the notion of madness and that of the fury, melancholy slowly became the illness of the heroes, as is shown in the text of pseudo- Aristotle, too. Klibansky - Panofsky - Saxl, Saturno e la melanconia, 19.

12 standing in contrast to it,25 and so in consequence any kind of change occurring in the

order of one substantially affected the other as well. Therefore the melancholic

individual was seen as someone who does not obey the laws of the cosmos or those of

his own inseparable destiny. The Greeks used the expression ξισταμνοι to describe

the melancholy character, a term which indicates ‘those who surpass themselves.’

The interpretation of pseudo-Aristotle was much more spiritual and had an

extremely strong influence upon the attitude of Renaissance scholars26 to the same

question, as we shall see later on. According to the author of the Problems,

melancholy was a higher state, in which the “sick” person, despite his condition (or

because of it) is nonetheless able to create durable, fascinating works also. He

explains their unstable temperament as being due to the changeability of the

temperature of the black bile: it can vary considerably, and it is a certain mixture

moderately heated which can lead to extraordinary accomplishments in the arts or in

statesmanship. Melancholy enables those who take part of it to transcend the ordinary

boundaries of human destiny, although only in case its temperature is acceptable, not

too high, but not even too low. Thus, the melancholic is characterised by the

idiopathic dichotomy of oscillation between average and extreme. According to the

actual temperature of the black bile, he can be like any other member of the

community, or conversely can perform something outstanding.

24 Diet was considered to be responsible for the introduction of various substances in the body: some of

CEU eTD Collection them were utilised, while others were indigestible. These latter substances were the “surplus humours” (with the exception of blood), the ones that formed the four substantial humours. 25 In Theophrastus we find, for instance, that man and universe derive from the same primary elements, therefore, there is unity between them, the macrocosm and the microcosm. Klibansky - Panofsky - Saxl, Saturno e la melanconia, 10. 26 The connection between melancholy, genius and divination is quite a well-studied field of research. The most important books on melancholy in general, and this aspect in particluar, apart from the book written by Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, are the following: Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), Wolf Lepenies, Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), Hellmut Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1966), and Hubertus Tellenbach,

13 It is precisely the dichotomy, which makes the melancholic surpass limits all

the time, and inspires him to create great works. Pseudo-Aristotle refers to

Bellerophon, Hercules, Empedocles, Plato and Socrates as famous examples of the

melancholy character. The first two are mythological figures, who both, while being

human, have something divine in them, too. This is an ambiguity that gives them a

liminal status: they dwell in between the two realms, not belonging completely to

either of the two, and later on they are both taken over by a kind of madness. After

having completed so many great works, Bellerophon becomes loathsome to the gods

because he starts to think he is one of them, while Hercules, after having been

introduced to the mysteries of Eleusis, goes mad and kills his own family. The

madness of the heroes Hercules and Bellerophon was a consequence of their

singularity, and their particularity is due to the fact that they have inside them the

possibility of becoming mad, outsiders. This is the first time when the cluster of

concepts all concentrated in one precise term, melancholy, becomes related to

madness, too. The sequence of thoughts and ideas is not finished, since more and

more is added to this in the course of the interpretation that follows. Madness,

represented in Greek mythology by the goddess Lyssa,27 is connected with the night

and the darkness, the realm of invisible things, and thus in consequence even to the

world of dreams.

Just like the night that makes invisible things visible, dreams were also

considered means by which the hidden rises to the surface. In his De divinatione per CEU eTD Collection

Melancholie: Problemgeschichte, Endogenität, Typologie, Pathogenese, Klinik (Berlin: Springer, 1974). 27 The name of the goddess requires an etymological explanation. The Greek term  ύσσα has the primary meaning of ‘fury’ or ‘rage’ (in Homer it is always a martial rage), after Homer, it stands for ‘raging madness’, ‘frenzy,’ such as was caused by the gods (for example that of Orestes, or of the Bacchants).

14 somnium,28 Aristotle says that during the night-dream deep truths reveal themselves to

the dreamer, since it makes possible the vision of things otherwise invisible, which

implies that it helps divination, too. Here we have a new member in the conceptual

set of melancholy, namely divination.

Certainly not the whole ancient Greek tradition shared the same enthusiasm

for melancholy. Plato himself, mentioned by pseudo-Aristotle as an example for

genial melancholy, put that phenomenon in contrast to divine frenzy (μανία or

mania), saying that melancholy was a kind of madness (but not mania) that chained

man to earth, to the terrestrial realm, while he saw the mania as enabling man to enter

the celestial, divine realm. (In fact, the divine frenzy was one of the five channels,

including magic, which provided man the possibility to ascend to the celestial realm).

However, pseudo-Aristotle managed to resolve this dichotomy, uniting the

metaphysical features of Platonic mania with the psychological characteristics of

melancholy: he made a distinction between pathological and natural melancholy.

While the first appeared to be a temporary and qualitative alteration of the humour,

which provoked different illnesses, the second seemed to be a constitutional and

quantitative prevalence of the black bile over the other humours in the body. The one

who was provided such a natural melancholy was considered to have an entirely

particular (which means ‘ethos,’ custom or habit) even in state of perfect health.

This approach made the melancholic individual fundamentally and completely

different from the masses, the normal people.29 CEU eTD Collection We have seen so far how different concepts are brought together in a

systematic view of the whole universe, including man as an organic part of it.

However, we can go further if we follow the Greeks and add new elements to this

28 In The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon, ed. (New York: Random House, 1941).

15 conceptual sphere. According to pseudo-Aristotle the melancholic is able to foretell

the future with amazing precision and reliability, and in his juvenilia30 Aristotle

connected it with dreaming, too. Thus it is asserted in fact that the ability to foresee

the future is very much related to the melancholy temperament, and this is even more

obvious in the case of dream-divination since dreaming is a state in which the dreamer

is closer to the secrets, the invisible truth.

The seer is beyond time and space as he moves freely between present and

future, here and now, there and then. He always focuses on truth: since he is beyond

the concept of time and space, he does not depend on changing views and illusionary

beliefs. The figure of the seer is always a chosen one by the gods. Plato says31 that

the ability of divination is given by gods in the form of the divine frenzy, the above

mentioned mania: the power which raises the seer into the celestial sphere. The

inscription of the oracle of Delphi (Γνθι σεαυτν, “Know yourself”) testifies to the

belief that the greatest seer is the one who sees the present, reveals what we, at the

moment, have inside us. That is what mysteries were made for: they reveal some

truth to the chosen ones, very often making them aware of the triviality and futility of

terrestrial life – the parallel to Plato’s and indirectly to Socrates’ view on the vanity of

earthly life compared to that after the body’s death is striking. While they were still

mortal beings, the initiates realised that they no longer belonged to mortal life, as they

knew what most other people did not, and, conversely, this knowledge in this life

excluded them from the divine sphere too. CEU eTD Collection Not being able to share with the others what he knows, the melancholic

becomes silent and introverted, neglected by the rest of the community or the society.

29 Klibansky - Panofsky - Saxl, Saturno e la melanconia, 29. 30 Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum (pages 626-630); De somniis (pages 618-625), in The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon, ed. (New York: Random House, 1941). 31 Plato, Phaedrus, 244a-245c.

16 Their silence is a requirement on the one hand that comes from the outside; on the

other, it soon becomes an internal demand, too. This provoked partly envy, partly

despite from the non-melancholic outsider. The others usually tried to tame

melancholy by labelling it a simple, curable illness, a characteristic of the average

man (a tendency very characteristic of the Middle Ages).32 Furthermore, the

melancholics are very often misanthropes because they despise those who still live in

ignorance. According to Plato, in fact, when the soul reaches to the state of

knowledge, it becomes perfect, and the rest of the time it spends in the truth among

the gods.33

Traditionally the melancholic’s planet is Saturn: in Orphic theology, Cronos

has prophetic abilities, he is a πρόμαντις”soothsayer”)who reveals the secrets of

being, while Romans associated Saturn directly with melancholy, calling this planet

the ‘midnight sun.’ The view that those who are able to prophesy and know the

esoteric rituals of the mysteries were born under Saturn34 was widely disseminated in

the Hellenistic period.

Over the course of the centuries the organic unity of the cosmos had been

broken and turned into something completely different: the cosmos and the individual

were no longer seen as forming an organic unity in which they interacted in mutual

co-dependence, but they were seen as diametrically opposed points in a chain of

being. The organic interdependence turned into a system of correspondences, and the

vague ideas concerning the four humours were elaborated into a system where every CEU eTD Collection single man could be described as a melancholy, sanguine, choleric or phlegmatic

32 There are numerous correlatives also in Renaissance context, such as A Treatise on Melancholy of Timothie Bright (London, 1586), which is almost entirely a medical treatise on the physiological symptoms of melancholy that provides detailed regimen in order to cure the patient suffering from an excess of black bile. 33 Plato, Phaedrus, 249c-d

17 character. With this transformation in the history of a concept, we have arrived at the

Middle Ages.

2. The Middle Ages and a Different Attitude to the Same Question

The medieval understanding of the humours was completely different from the

Renaissance Neoplatonist one: the humours of the man before the Fall were seen as

having been mingled after the Fall, and in consequence the four temperaments are

four different manifestations of the same sin. There is no man without temperament

and there is no temperament without sin.35 Melancholy was a sin or a disease whose

subject excluded himself from the community and the society. Thus the primary

concern of some medieval authors, such as Avicenna (see the quotation below) was to

establish an intricate network of kinds of melancholy in which every single individual

could be fitted, while others dealt with the possible medication of the patient suffering

from an excess of black bile.36

The question, whether a perfect, a completely balanced temperament was

possible, engrossed the attention of medieval scholars above all, although they

seemed to agree that this temperies was a privilege of Christ and no human being was

destined to reach that perfection after him.37 Furthermore, the studium vehemens, too

34 See the book of Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn. The Character and Conduct of Artist (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963). 35 In the preface to the eighth book of her Subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum libri novem (Patrologia Latina, vol. 197) Saint Hildegard of Bingen says that all creatures were good before Adam’s fall. After Abel’s blood stained the soil, noxious humours arose. 36

CEU eTD Collection Gentile da Foligno, in his Consilia (commentaries on the Canon of Avicenna, written most probably between 1338 and 1340, in Muratori, ed. Scriptores Rerum Italicarum XVI and XXIV), for instance, describes cases of brain desease, and brings forth melancholy as an example for it, while Michele Savonarola (1384-1466) in the De decorandis Ferrariensibus, states that every artist appears to be a little bit bizarre, thus he is a forerunner of the modern idea that relates the artistic temperament to genius and insanity. 37 Alfonso Ingegno, “Cardano e Bruno. Altri spunti per una storia dell’uomo perfetto,” in Eckhardt Kessler, ed., Girolamo Cardano: Philosoph, Naturforscher, Arzt (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 78; Ingegno reminds the reader that Petrus Abanus, in his Conciliator (Pietro d’Abano, Conciliator: Ristampa fotomeccanica dell’edizione Venetiis apud Iuntas 1565, Ezio Riondato, Luigi Olivvieri, eds. Padua, 1985), for the first time suggests a relation between the miracles of Christ and the doctrine of a

18 much intense study and effort, was considered the origin of melancholy: in fact, while

in both Antiquity and in the Renaissance again knowledge was one of the means by

which man could ascend to divinity, in the centuries that intervened theology was the

only official way to enquire the fate.

The medieval melancholic was seen as someone who retreats into the depths

of his own soul; one who builds up the world from himself and creates a God from his

own efforts – a God which is not the God of anyone but the one who created it. There

is of course a sin inherent in this solipsism: the sin of acedia, since the melancholic

thus turns away from both God and the universe which God has created as good.38

The melancholic is thus estranged from God’s grace and communion with his fellow

creatures. As mysterious the world is for him, so does the world find him

mysterious.39 In Christianity it is the faith that brings the man to redemption, but this

faith has its very precise subject, it is καθοός, general, the same for everyone.

The way to redemption in the eyes of the melancholic is far too simplified and finite,

due to the fact that all the believers, average people and highly cultivated litterati,

share the same mysteries: Catholicism is a common act. The melancholic realises that

the way only leads to one single end, and is desperately trying to widen the

dimensions of his microcosm. It leads to solitude, which in fact was considered in the

Middle Ages as an estrangement from divine grace. CEU eTD Collection

perfect temperament, claiming however that the presence in him of some elements of melancholy (his tristitia, for example) was in striking contrast to the possibility of it. 38 A more recent authority on melancholy, the philosopher and psychologist Julia Kristeva, characterises the depressed person as “a radical, sullen atheist.” Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 5. 39 Albertus Magnus links the melancholy character to the figure of the saint and the prophet, gifted ones who have a great sharpness of mind, since their perception is not disturbed by mundane thoughts and influences. See Marta Fattori, “Sogni e temperamenti,” in Tullio Gregory, ed. I Sogni nel Medioevo (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1985), 100.

19 Melancholy indeed, apart from being a sin, was also treated as a mental

illness: Avicenna40 said that it was the devil that painted the bile black.41 The

medieval melancholic does not feel any progress either in time or in space, but stays

in one place hesitating all the time. This is why his figure became characterised very

often by sloth (‘sloth’ being the most common – if inaccurate translation of acedia in

English lists of the seven deadly sins), passivity, and lack of interest in worldly

matters (“the devil makes work for idle hands”).

Nevertheless we have to admit that the understanding of melancholy in the

Middle Ages was far from being categorically negative: there are many examples

when it is related to special abilities, such as an extraordinary disposition for visions

and dreams.42 In fact, the complexio melancholica was characterised as especially

adequate for the reception of veracious dreams.43

3. The Melancholy of Renaissance; The Renaissance of Melancholy

So far, I have attempted to find the reason for the popularity of the hermetic texts and

I have indicated the possibility of their interpretation as justifications for the self-

consciousness of Renaissance scholars. Summarising the history of and the attitude to

the conceptual sphere of melancholy, I intend to give a brief overview of an idea that

had a great effect on the Italian Neoplatonic and Humanist circles.

40 Avicenna summarises the characteristics of the four substantial humours in the following way: “Et dicimus quod cholera nigra faciens melancholiam, cum est cum sanguine, est cum gaudio et risu et non concomitatur ipsam tristitia vehemens. Si autem est cum phlegmate est cum pigritia et paucitate motus et quiete. Et si est cum cholera, vel ex cholera est cum agitatione et aliquali daemonio et est similis

CEU eTD Collection maniae. Et si fuerit cholera nigra pura, tunc cogitatio in ipsa erit plurima et agitatio furiositas erit minus: nisi moveatur et rixetur et habeat odium curius non obliviscitur.” Avicenna, Liber canonis (Venice, 1555), III, I, 4, 19. 41 The black bile was also called “balneum diaboli,” ‘bath of the devil’. 42 The commentary on the De divinatione per somnum of Aristotle by Averroës, for example says: “Et quidam homines sunt verioris somnii, quam quidam, propter diversitatem eorum in hac virtute imaginativa: et isti sunt habentes complexiones melancholicas frigidas et siccas. Humiditas enim cooperit virtutes et oppilat vias spirituum et facit somnium simile morti, ita quod fere nihil imaginatur dormiens.” De divinatione per somnum, Opera omnia (Venice, 1562), VI, 2, 36-37. 43 The Oneirocriticon of Muhammad Ibn Sirin (recently translated into Italian with the title Il libro del sogno veritiero (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), which enjoyed a great popularity in the course of the

Figure 1 The image above is an engraving of Albrecht Dürer, which contains all the iconographic accessories of the representation of melancholy. The ball, for instance, indicates the insecurity of the melancholic, while the Mensula Iovis was believed to cure that strange “illness.”

Let us now examine the perception of the concept of melancholy in the

Renaissance where it gains new features. The greatest exponents of the Florentine

Neoplatonic school, such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, were also very

interested in the problem of characters, and especially the melancholy temperament.

They knew the ancient Greek tradition of pseudo-Aristotle and the medical treatises of

Hippocrates and Galen and were more than conscious about the importance of these.

A new interpretation was born to the same concept in the course of the period

between the fifteenth and the seventeenth century, fashioned to the taste and

requirements of the epoch. It was rather a reformulation of the pseudo-Aristotelian

thesis, which adorned the melancholic with special abilities, such as the ability to

foretell the future and to create or perform extraordinary works. This was most CEU eTD Collection

acceptable to Ficino, too, because in developing the original theory he could find

Renaissance as well, was translated for the first time into Latin by Leo Tuscus in 1175, and this is the period when the first translation of the Problemata of pseudo-Aristotle was made.

21 another justification for the claim that man is not a passive but an absolutely active

participant in the chain of events.

Ficino argued that by using his capacities and making efforts man is able to

surpass the boundaries of the ordinary and enter the sublime, widening the dimension

of the world. The melancholic, according to him, is ambiguous and dynamic,

demented and sane, enthusiastic and depressed at the same time. He is responsible for

his own destiny, able to control and change it. The reason for his solitude is due to a

choice: he has chosen to know more than is usual. Even if the others take him for a

fool and leave him alone, this is to be seen as a reasonable price to pay, and indeed the

melancholic sees himself as the balanced and ordinary one.

In the interpretation of the Ficinian school the Platonic metaphysical view of

mania is combined with the pseudo-Aristotelian, mainly naturalistic attitude to

melancholy. The litterati, primarily philosophers, are particularly subject to

melancholy, because the philosopher has to sever his mind from the external motions

of the body and bring it closer to God, making it an instrument of the divine, Unde

divinis influxibus oraculisque ex alto repletus, nova quaedam inusitataque semper

excogitat, et futura praedicit.44 Ficino himself was a melancholic, which he explains

through the constellation of the planets at his birth, “Saturn seems to have impressed

the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning... But Venus in Libra and Jupiter in

Cancer have, perhaps, offered some resistance to this melancholy nature.”45 On the

basis of the passages just quoted we can see how ambiguous was the interpretation of CEU eTD Collection the melancholy temperament in Ficinian thought, but, even if his idea of black bile

was the most influential one in the Renaissance, views on the ability of the

44 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, eds. and tr. (Tempe, AZ: The Renaissance Society of America, 1998), Book One, VII, 123.

22 melancholic to foresee and foretell the future could find strong support in other

authors, too.46

The figure of Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, the disciple of Trithemius, is

best known as the author of De occulta philosophia,47 a juvenile compendium of

occult wisdom of his time, in which he also deals with the interrelations of

melancholy, genius, divination and even demons. He makes a clear distinction

between good and bad melancholy: the good melancholy is that which – after having

reached the right temperature – incites man to a fury leading to insight and divination

(like Ficino he believes that this could happen only under the influence of certain

favourable planetary constellations, namely that of Saturn), while the harmful

melancholy attracts only bad spirits (mali daemones).48

”Moreover, since [Saturn] himself is the author of the mysterious

contemplation, not given to public dealing, the highest of the planets, he first recalls

the soul from offices to its core, then has it ascend from lower matters, leading it to

the highest, and grants it the sciences and the foreknowledge of the future.”49 This

passage bridges the gap between the two criteria on the basis of which I studied the

possible sources (that is to say, Hermetic texts and the interpretations of melancholy)

of the self-consciousness of Renaissance scholars. Agrippa indeed points out the

possibility of the ascension of the soul, even if he makes Saturn responsible for that.

45 Letter of Marsilio Ficino to Giovanni Cavalcanti in The Letters of Marsilio Ficino. Tr. by members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1978)

CEU eTD Collection (2 vols.). 46 Certainly, not all Renaissance thinkers considered melancholy to be “the most desirable temperament.” According to Schleiner, the example of Celso Mancini, in his De somniis ac Synesi per somnia, De risu ac ridiculis, Synaugia Platonica (Ferrara: Baldini, 1591), for instance, shows that in the late sixteenth century “it was no longer possible to expound at length the melancholic’s outstanding abilities of foresight and divination without taking into account an increasing opposition to this view,” 39. Indeed, later on the critical approach, mainly clerical, to the question of genial melancholy transformed “the most desirable temperament” into the “humor pessimus.” 47 Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia libri 3 (Cologne: J. Stoer 1533). 48 Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance, 26. 49 I use Schleiner’s translations of Agrippa, in Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance, 26

23 This was not contrary at all to the idea of exaltatio taken from the Hermetic corpus,

but was a very useful completion, necessary for the sake of it for the sake of the

sublime theory of the “chosen ones.”

We have now sketched out the history of ideas concerning melancholy and

transcendence of this world, and seen that from the ideas of Antiquity and Hermetism

to those of Renaissance Neoplatonism there is a certain correspondence, a circle.

Given some preliminary conditions (being born under Saturn, the highest of

the planets, and having a melancholy character, possessing a certain purity of the soul

and yearning for the contemplation of celestial beauty by ascending to God, being

familiar with the means that make the ascension possible, such as the furies and the

magical practices) one can enter the higher spheres (carried away by the divine

frenzy, receiving revelation by dreams or in other mystical ways) and foresee the

future. This all could happen due to the immense goodness of God: it is true that His

love, providence and grace concern all, but there are some chosen ones50 particularly

dear to Him whom He finds worthy of sharing some of His secrets with.

4. Gerolamo Cardano: A Case Study of a Chosen One?

Within the framework of the conceptual sphere of selectness I intend to examine

Gerolamo Cardano’s attitude to and interpretation of the single ideas contained in the

the term “melancholy”: his understanding of the role of dreams and good demons

(daimons) as intermediaries between the terrestrial and the celestial realms, his CEU eTD Collection solitude, volunteer or not, the extraordinary intelligence he claimed to possess.

50 There is evidence in Aristotle, too, for the obvious relation between God-sent gifts, such as dreams and selectness: “For, in addition to its further unreasonableness, it is absurd to combine the idea that the sender of such dreams should be God with the fact that those to whom he sends them are not the best and wisest, but merely commonplace persons.” De divinatione per somnum, in Richard McKeon, ed. The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941) 462b, 626.

24 In my understanding he considered himself a chosen one with special abilities

in foreseeing the future, one who was particularly dear to God as proven by the fact

that he received admonitions and information in a great variety of forms regarding the

future (the future of his family and himself, almost exclusively).

The sources for my research are of two different kinds: on the one hand I shall

study the De propria vita, which I consider the non-scientific formulation of the

author’s ideas and which is full of miraculous stories all accentuating Cardano’s

centrality in his microcosmos, while on the other I shall try to find the passages that

refer to the traditions of Hermetism and melancholy. There is written evidence that

he agreed with pseudo-Aristotle concerning the ability of prediction attributed to the

melancholic character, Quod melancholici futura praevideant, innumeris confirmatur

exemplis51 but it is not made clear whether he considered himself a melancholic, or

even used melancholy as justification for his special abilities. The relation between

melancholy, divination, genius, dreams, and daimons is far too striking and the

temptation to examine the work of one particular Renaissance scholar within this

framework is far too great to resist.

CEU eTD Collection

51 Gerolamo Cardano, Paralipomenon, Opera omnia X, 462.

II. Image of the Self in the Autobiography

In the previous chapter I provided a brief summary and overview of the concepts

which lay behind the very concise term “melancholy.” The idea of a nexus between

melancholy and genius, the gift of divination in relation to the character determined

by an excess of black bile, became a crucial topic, which divided Renaissance

thinkers. My argument in the previous chapter was that there were some written

sources (the Corpus Hermeticum) and traditions (that of melancholy, first of all) that

some Renaissance scholars (Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, to mention

only the greatest exponents of Florentine Neoplatonism) used as justifications for

their claim to be the centre of the universe, chosen ones ready to ascend to the divine

realm before the end of their terrestrial career. Besides this Neoplatonic idea, we find

further examples of the very characteristic self-consciousness in the early modern

period, but the best way to shed light on this particular aspect is to take a concrete

example, an enigmatic and symbolic figure whose personality and ideology will serve

as a case study.

Gerolamo Cardano was a very prolific writer, a fertile mind whose various

writings on the most diverse topics fill ten folio volumes, and yet the book that has

always been the most widely read is undoubtedly the De propria vita, entitled the

umbelicus scriptorum by the author himself.52 Before entering upon a more profound

analysis of this work, we should highlight the importance of the genre of self- CEU eTD Collection narrative from the point of view of this research, dedicated to the very complex

network of ideas contained in the term “melancholia,” and which – in the hands of an

expert – can be transformed into a means of self-fashioning.

26 Traditionally – on the condition that we accept John Freccero’s statement – the

Confessions of Augustine “presented for the first time the literary self-creation of an

individual seen both as object and as subject, with all of the contradictions that those

aspects imply.”53 Although Freccero’s article focuses mainly on confessional

autobiographies (such as those of Augustine and Teresa of Avila), claiming that the

autobiographical genre implies in a way “the death of the self as character and the

resurrection of the self as author,”54 some of the medieval confessional-literary

patterns can be applied to late Renaissance, non-confessional self-narratives as well

(such as the Vita of Benvenuto Cellini,55 the Diario of Jacopo Pontormo,56 or the De

vita propria of Cardano). Some of these patterns are the following: the

autobiography, which is a very specific genre,57 implies a separation between the self

as protagonist and the self as narrator (in Freccero’s understanding, Augustine’s

Confessions can be formulated as “from Augustinus to alter Augustinus”58): the

observing self is segregated from the observed. Furthermore, he argues that “every

self-narrative is the extension of a moment of self-consciousness into a temporal

sequence,”59 a certain awakening, the beginning of a critical approach to one’s own

past and present. This consciousness, the self being aware of itself sometimes as

totally other, this peculiar reduplication of it, is retraceable in autobiographies from

52 Cardano, De propria vita, in Opera omnia (Lyons: Ravaud and Huguetan, 1663.) I, XLV, 43. There are reprint editions of these ten volumes of 1663: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1966, and New York, 1967. 53

CEU eTD Collection John Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” in T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, D. E. Wellbery, eds., Reconstucting Individualism. Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.), 16. 54 Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” 16. 55 The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, J. A. Symonds, ed. (New York: Modern Library, s. a.). 56 Jacopo da Pontormo, Diario, Roberto Fedi, ed. (Rome: Salerno, 1996). 57 See Stefano Pittaluga, “L’autobiografia nell’Umanesimo,” in L’autobiografia nel Medioevo. Atti del convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 12-15 Ottobre 1997 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Strudi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1998). 58 Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” 19. 59 Ibid., 19.

27 Augustine through Petrarch60 to Cardano, and even, to our own days, as something

essential in this literary genre.

Petrarch – often seen by historians as the first Humanist and the first conscious

melancholic – portrays himself in a manner following in the footsteps of Augustine,

writing a “hagiography of the sinner”: the portrait of himself as a sinner is essential

for his characterising himself as unique.61 This is the approach and the kind of

conscious self-fashioning that in my opinion one can clearly notice in Cardano’s De

propria vita, as well.

The De propria vita was completed in 1576, in the year of the author’s death.

In his article,62 Buck classifies the genre of autobiography in three categories on the

basis of the author’s motivation: (1) self-justification in the eyes of contemporaries

and future generations; (2) fathoming the self in order to regulate one’s life; (3)

curiosity about one’s self-realised individuality. Cardano’s work is generally

considered as belonging to the first group. The fact that Cardano wrote the De

propria vita in his declining years (and it proved to be his last work, indeed) implies a

certain synoptic, summarising approach on the part of the author to the events of his

own life. The reader can suspect with good reason that this writing represents a last

effort at justifying himself before contemporaries and for posterity, an attempt to

show the world the author of hundreds of scientific works, the serious scholar, the

well-known physician and mathematician, denuded, in his pure and feeble mortality.

In fact, Cardano follows the Humanist tradition of self-narrative, but refuses to depict CEU eTD Collection himself in the idealistic way, the way he should have been (rejecting thus the example

of Marcus Aurelius); on the contrary, he portrays himself without any embellishment

60 Petrarca, Posteritati, in Prose (Milan: Ricciardi, 1955). 61 Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” 21. 62 August Buck, “Girolamo Cardano’s De propria vita,” in Studien zu Humanismus und Renaissance. Gesammelte Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1981-1990 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), 203.

28 (in this respect seeming to follow Suetonius).63 However, while acknowledging his

shortcomings (both physical and psychological), “this realisation remains of no

consequence on his conduct. Without remorse he accepts the way he is.”64

What is the reason for the great popularity of this book? First of all, it is full

of the description of supernatural events, prophetic dreams, extraordinary visions,

presentiments which all seemed to be extremely fascinating for readers both in the

Renaissance and in our own times. The characteristic that made the De propria vita

even more peculiar is the fact that Cardano does not seem to make any distinction

between psychological and physical aspects: he treats body and self as elements

inseparable from each other.65 Being a physician, he subscribed to the fundamental

significance of experience for the understanding of man and the world around him.66

Furthermore, he sees himself as one of his patients, or as a case study: his own self

represents a part of nature, and he collects retrospectively the many observations he

has made during a long life, he is subject to his own thorough observations; he even

reports his illnesses faithfully, which is also unique or at least very unusual in

Humanist writing. In the following I will try to find examples of his conscious effort

towards making, or building up, an image about himself: an image that shows a man

full of pride and very much aware of his particularity. Let me use his own words for

his description:

Scientia multarum rerum, itinera, pericula, munera quae exercui, conditiones oblatae, Principium amitia, fama, libri, miracula circa sanationes, et in aliis CEU eTD Collection

63 Ibid., 205. 64 Ibid., 205. 65 Anne C. E. van Galen, in her article “Body and Self-Image in the De propria vita of Gerolamo Cardano,” in Karl Enenkel, ed. Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998) argues that Cardano regards the physical as so much a substantial aspect of the self that we can almost say they are considered by him to be identical. She argues, furthermore, that Cardano applies Renaissance medical theory to the description of the self. 66 Buck, “Girolamo Cardano’s De propria vita,” 206.

29 quae contigerunt, et res rarae pene supra naturam, Spiritus insuper, et cognitio splendoris.67

I will try to show how the different concepts contained in the idea of

melancholy have their correlatives, one by one, in Cardano’s De propria vita. We

have seen that according to the ancient Greek tradition of melancholy, and especially

the Problems XXX, 1 of pseudo-Aristotle, the man characterised by the excess of

black bile is often seen as belonging to neither of the two realms: neither to the

human, nor to the divine. The melancholic surpasses all kinds of limits very often –

this transgression is necessary to perform something outstanding. In the case of

Gerolamo Cardano, his very birth involved a certain transgression of limits, since he

was born in spite of many interventions aiming at abortion, and mournful portents:68

Tentatis, ut audivi, abortivis medicamentis frustra, ortus sum an. M. D. VIII. Calend. Octobris, hora noctis prima non exacta69… Damnatus a prima pueritia ad mortem spirandi illa difficultate ... Astra quae minitabantur omnino obitum, ut omnes dicebant ante annum xlv. omnia vana inventa sunt.70

His conscious will to live is illustrated by the lines that follow: Natus ergo,

imo a matre extractus, tanquam mortuus, cum capillis nigris et crispis, recreatus

balneo vini calidi, quod alteri potuit esse pernitiosum.71 The family could not expect

anything better, having read the stars at the moment of the child’s birth: Cardano says

that very little was lacking for him to become a monstrous creature, had the stars not

been more benevolent in some respect. Apart from a few imperfections in his

physical appearance, they provided him with a special ability to foresee the future.

CEU eTD Collection This is reported by him in the following way:

67 Cardano, De propria vita, XXXII, 24. 68 In fact, his own birth appeared to him as exemplary from the astrological point of view, as we can see from the horoscope he cast for himself in the De exemplo centum geniturarum, Opera omnia V, 517–541. 69 Cardano, De propria vita, II, 2. 70 Ibid., XLI, 36. 71 Ibid., II, 2.

30 Et cum Venus72 dominaretur, ut dixi, toti figurae, et Iupiter esset in ascendente, factus sum abiectae sortis: lingua parum blaesus, et addita est propensio (ut Ptolemaus ait) media inter frigidam et Harpocratiam, id est rapacem et inconsultam divinationem: in quo genere (praesensionem honestiore vocabulo dicunt) non obscure aliquando valui: similiter ac in aliis divinandi generibus.73

As a kind of corroboration of the aforementioned particularity, namely the

idea that Cardano considered the self (that is, the psychological self) and the body as

identical, I shall quote a passage on a strange portent that appeared on the child

Cardano’s body, very interestingly, in the shape of a cross: Mihi carbunculi quinque

in facie crucis in effigiem, supervenerunt, ut unus, forest in nasi apice.74 The author

claims to have had mysterious signs on his body, with the obvious intention of

accentuating his peculiarity, which thereby manifested itself in this way, as in others,

at a very tender age. He was a child of delicate health, and subject to the most various

accidents, which he attributed to the wrath of the planet Jupiter: first he rolled down

the stairs, then a piece of plaster fell on his head while he was sitting on the doorstep

of his parents’ house, and in general, his childhood is depicted by him as a well-

designed field of obstacles.75 (In fact, Cardano dedicates whole chapters to the

dangers avoided due to his presentiments, such as the one entitled Pericula et casus,

72 In his De rerum varietate, Opera omnia III, XV, 79, Cardano states that among the five things that are necessary for one to acquire power of prediction one is being born under the planet Venus. Although traditionally Saturn was considered the ruling planet of melancholics, Cardano departs from received wisdom here. The question of whether he does so in good faith, or whether he rather conveniently ignores certain traditions when they appear to disprove or undermine his claim to elect status, is open. 73 Cardano, De propria vita, II, 2. 74

CEU eTD Collection Ibid., IV, 3. 75 This is an interesting parallel between Cardano and another fifteenth-century autobiographer, Ambrogio Traversari (Hodoeporicon, first published in 1431; a modern edition is also available of it, in V. Tamburini, ed. Florence: 1985) who claims to be protected by divine providence when almost falling from a mule. Even if this seems to be rather banal, we have to be aware of the constant centrality of the ego which makes the two authors belong to the same tradition of self-consciousness and pride. In the Itinerarium of Ciriaco d’Ancona (written in the 1450s, first published in L. Mehus, ed. Florence, 1742), furthermore, another similarity catches the reader’s attention: we can see the same narcissistic self-celebration as in Cardano’s work, when Ciriaco inserts a series of encomia into his autobiography, which – according to him – were written by the most famous Humanists of the epoch. Cardano does much the same when he attaches a list of all the scholars who mentioned his name in

31 et de insidiis multiplicibus, variis, et assiduis).76 The gods (as he puts it) kept an eye

on him even in his adulthood:

In adversis autem quae levia erant, pro admonitione ut caverem accepi; et o quoties eiusmodi monitis, maximas vitavi calamitates!77 ... Non de hoc miror quod ita contigerit, sed quod cum toties viam mutaverim, nunquam sponte, nini in huiusmodi periculis, forsan alias non animadverti. Attamen res magna, non admiranda, si exemplum frequens non adesset.78

What is more, his father – a highly cultivated man – had the habit of taking the

young boy with him, wherever he went, as a kind of servant who had to carry his

paraphernalia. These were the occasions when Cardano became familiar with the

rudiments of mathematics, astrology, and geometry; however, his account of his

father’s attitude reveals something less than enthusiasm: Sed non mutata sors mea,

nam rursus pater me ut servum ducebat secum mira pertinacia, ne dicam saevitia, ut

divino potius consilio factum, ex his quae post sequuta sunt credas quam patris

culpa.79 This statement (or perhaps it is better to call it an allusion) is again a

manifestation of his conviction that someone somewhere had serious designs for him.

The physical features of Cardano and his extraordinary self-image, which explains the

physical by the transcendent and vice versa, are very well illustrated by the passage

that follows: brachiis admodum tenuibus, dextra manu crassiore, digitsque

incompactis, ut chiromantici rudem esse pronunciarint ac stupidum: inde ubi norunt

puduerit.80 Thus, then, he had a poor constitution, he suffered from the most various

illnesses, he seemed to be exposed to constant life-threatening danger, when finally, CEU eTD Collection

their work. The question whether this displays vainglory, narcissism, or disappointed insecurity must remain open at this point. See Pittaluga, “L’autobiografia nell’Umanesimo,” 304. 76 Cardano, De propria vita, XXX, 18. 77 Ibid., XXIII, 15. 78 Ibid., XXX, 19. 79 Ibid., IV, 3. 80 Ibid., V, 5.

32 after all these mournful portents and events, it was a dream that foretold to him the

positive changes to come in his life.

Figure 2 Portrait of Gerolamo Cardano from 1557 (source unknown).

Bearing in mind what we have said in the introduction about the melancholy

character, we can see clearly how the basic features of the melancholic type (liminal

status, capacity of foreseeing the future, ability of divination by dreams, inclination to

madness and loneliness, claims to be chosen ones, connections to the transcendent, for

instance) reappear in Cardano’s self-descriptions in his De propria vita.

Dreams are extremely important in this context: they are considered to be a

link between the divine and the human sphere, a mystical field where a unilateral

communication from God’s side to human beings seems to be possible. The

CEU eTD Collection dreamer’s soul is freed – loosed by Lyssa, one might say, referring to an older, but

still influential, if latent and atavistic tradition – from the chains of the senses and the

characteristics of the waking state, and as such it can partake of a higher knowledge,

that of future events, for instance. Considering the importance of this aspect, instead

33 of proceeding in chronological order from event to event in his biography, I prefer to

analyse the concepts which overlap with the ones we have already used to describe

the melancholy character.

Dreams had a special place in Cardano’s work: he dedicated a vast book to the

classification and interpretation of them, the Synesiorum somniorum libri IV,81 but I

find it much more idiosyncratic and peculiar that he uses his dreams as evidence for

his ability to foresee the future, and in general, for the unspoken claim that he was a

chosen one. Very interestingly, these dreams usually reveal a misfortune to come in

his family, or a turn in his professional career: indeed, in the majority of the cases

they are directed to different members of his familial and social circle – that is to say,

his personal microcosm of the world in general.82 A colourful collection of prophetic

or at least important dreams is available in his Synesiorum somniorum, book IV, and

the De propria vita is also full of accounts of various somnia. Here I report the one

he had before he met his wife, because – according to his own interpretation – that

dream intimated to him all the fateful and sorrowful events to come.

Ac quasi mortalis in immortali sede collocatus, aut ut melius dicam, iucunditate: cum ecce nocte quadam, video me in horto quodam amoeno, nimisque pulchro, floribus ornato, fructibus diversi generis referto, spirabat aura suavis, ut nihil iucundius non pictor, non Pulcius Poeta, non cogitatio simile quicquam confingre posset; etiam in vestibulo horti, ostium apertum patebat, et aliud inde ex adverso: cum ecce video puellam candida veste indutam, eam adeo amplector, exosculor, statim a primo osculo hortulanus clausit ostium, enixe coepi rogare ut apertum dimitteret, nunquam potui obtinere: moestus itaque, et puellae haerens, exclusus manere visus sum.83

Cardano explains this dream as predicting his marriage to a beautiful young CEU eTD Collection

woman, but at the same time the sense of being trapped in a situation unpleasant to

81 Cardano, Synesiorum somniorum libri IIII, Opera omnia (Lyon: Huguetan & Ravaud, 1663), V. I will return to the analysis of this work in the next chapter, dedicated to his scientific works, where I intend to describe briefly the traditions (Aristotle, Macrobius, Artemidorus, inter alia) he used for the creation of his own theories on and classification of dreams. 82 There are a few exceptions, such as the case when he foresaw that Cyprus would fall to the Turks.

34 him, one he could not escape from. There are topics that seem to be central to

Cardano’s interest, as proven by the fact that he returns to them, under different titles.

One of these favourite motifs in his life is his awareness (obsession, in fact) of being a

victim to the spite of some contemporary scholars who went as far as to even try to

poison him, more than once, in his own house. These are stories that sometimes verge

on slapstick, but we should note that Cardano reports them very gravely, to such an

extent that he finds it no exaggeration to say that the death of his enemies (even those

who accused his son, Giambattista84), which occurred briefly after they wanted to hurt

him, was due to divine providence:

Ergo cum viderem me potius providentia divina fervatum, quam propria solertia, desii, in posterum solicitus adeo esse de periculis: verum quis non videt haec omnia, quasi fuisse gloriae consecuturae praeiudicia, aut vigilam quandam (...) ?85

Divine providence indeed has a central role in the creation of Cardano’s image

of the self.86 His accounts of his special abilities are even more central to his De

propria vita than the stories on vicious enemies ready to murder him. There are

various chapters on extraordinary presentiments, visions, and phenomena both natural

and supernatural, which were all destined to draw his attention to those things that he

should avoid, or simply take into consideration. Let us gather some of the most

interesting accounts from his De propria vita. A dream I have quoted in its entirety

showed him that his marriage would be full of difficulties, manifested first of all in

the children granted to him: two boys, Giambattista and Aldo, and a girl, Chiara. CEU eTD Collection There were, however, further admonitions for Cardano, which were supposed to point

83Cardano, De propria vita, XXVI, 16. 84 “Eorum qui ipsum accusarunt nemo non nisi magna calamitate evasit, aut perculsus, aut enectus.” Ibid., XLI, 36. 85 Ibid., XXX, 21-22.

35 out the mournful events to come. The elder son, Giambattista, was only a few days

old only when a huge wasp flew into the room where the whole family was, and after

having terrified everyone for some minutes, it just left the place all of a sudden

without doing any harm to the child. It was a grave portent in the eyes of the Cardano

family, something that provoked fear and anxiety in them. Later on, when

Giambattista was taken to prison under the accusation of having poisoned his wife, a

stain of blood in the shape of a sword appeared on Cardano’s palm, and stayed there

for fifty-two days. The way he got to know that his son had married the woman

whom he had recommended him not to marry (because of her bad reputation) was an

earthquake that no one else experienced or even noticed but him: Cogitavi divinum

nuncium, quod cognovisset conclusum vesperi, nocte voluisse significare, nam ubi

illuxisset, antequam domo prodiret, agressus eram filius.87 A few months afterwards,

he heard a monotonous singing voice from the street, and he realised that his son had

confessed and was thus lost, because the song he heard was very similar to a lament

and in its tone it was similar to a confession. The death of Giambattista, however,

was not due to God’s wrath, according to the author, but was the result of a

conspiracy against him by his numerous enemies, and the many rivals who envied

him. He claims that his enemies wanted him to lose his mind (or even die) of the pain

he would feel on the loss of his favourite son:

Confessi sunt quidam e Senatu (sed puto non de seipsis intelligi voluisse) ea spe damnasse illum, ut dolore interirem, aut insanirem, at unoque quam parum abfuerim, Superi norunt (et ego suo loco enarrabo) sed non successit.”88 CEU eTD Collection

86 “Et similiter de successu, quod non nisi deplorata iam omni spe illuxerit occasio, ut omnino Dei voluntate factum videri debeat.” Ibid., XXXVII, 27. We should not neglect the evolution in the terms he uses: this is no longer providentia, but directly voluntate. 87 Ibid., XLI, 35. Very interestingly, we can find the following lines in Hippocrates’ Regimen, 4: the trembling of the earth or of a house means an illness when the dreamer is in good health, and vice versa. In Steven M. Oberhelman, “Dreams in Graeco-Roman Medicine,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II Principat 37.1, Wolfgang Haase, ed.. 121-156 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980). 88 Cardano, De propria vita, X, 8.

At this point, another very important concept known from the sphere of

melancholy (and mentioned in the previous chapter) should be introduced to the

interpretation of Cardano’s De propria vita, that is, madness. We have seen that the

burden of being a chosen one, with a liminal status, was seen as something very

difficult to bear with a sane mind. Those gifted ones, who had an insight in the

hidden dimensions of life, were often considered madmen. The same applies to

Cardano. There is a vast literature on his supersensitive mind.89

The younger son, Aldo did not give him any joy in his life: he became a thief,

who even broke into the house of his own father in order to burgle him, while the

daughter was feared to be barren for a long time.90 It seems, despite all the tragedies

which happened to different members of his family, that he tells all these things in his

De propria vita in order to accentuate his own mournful destiny, and perhaps to win

the compassion of his readers. If we go further in the interpretation, we see that he

suggests something like this: the tragedies could have been avoided had he been able

to use his special abilities more efficiently. This is a very grave responsibility that he

has to bear: it is not only his own destiny in his hands but also his relatives’ fate; to a

certain measure, albeit from a different point of view (by means of science, as a kind

of mission on earth to disseminate knowledge), even the whole of mankind owes him

a lot. I shall return to this aspect later.

CEU eTD Collection 89 Cesare Lombroso’s Genio e Follia, just to mention a well-known example, contains a rather lively description of Cardano’s strange habits. Nevertheless, I agree with August Buck, who states, “it would be difficult, indeed impossible, to obtain a definitive picture of Cardano’s psychological make-up from the available materials, since he is himself essentially our only source of information.” Buck, “Girolamo Cardano’s De propria vita,” 209. 90 In the De rerum varietate, VIII, 40, Cardano asserts that the sons of the wisest men go to the bad: “Et ob id filii sapientissimorum ignavi videntur quia iam mixtio ad summum subtilitatis pervenit: igitur infirmi fiunt corpore atque ideo etiam anima.” This, again, is a very ambiguous statement, for it implies that Cardano judged his children as being somewhat degenerate, while it also implies that he considered himself a “sapientissimus.” Again, the question of whether he was taking a kind of comfort

37 His accuracy in saying extraordinary things goes as far as reporting some of

the miracles occurring to him in a list where the different “items” are indicated with

numbers. (It is rather unusual, after all, to see a “miracle number one” in a written

work.)

Miracles may be impersonal, but in Cardano’s case – typically, in the age of

Humanism and its emphasis on the human actor rather than the empyrean and

impersonal cosmos or the mind of God – they involve protagonists. These

protagonists may be agents, or they may be passive, affected by the events of this

world, or by the repercussions or reverberations of events in some other sphere. For

the most part, they are Cardano’s family members. But they need not be so – and

indeed, they need not be human.

In the case of melancholy character in general, and now, in the case of

Gerolamo Cardano in particular, we can see how important the role of various

intermediaries is in this context. The melancholic has a straight connection to the

transcendent world: this connection, always somewhat mysterious, is more easily

graspable in the case of dreams, but less perceivable when we have to face demons,

angels, or different kinds of messengers.

Cardano reports some very interesting stories in his De propria vita on

guardian angels, daimones and other, indefinable creatures that appeared to him with

the intention of helping him or revealing to him something from the future. The first

apparition was that of a young man who visited Cardano many times while he was CEU eTD Collection sleeping: he sat down by the side of Cardano’s bed and talked to him in a gentle

even in such familial troubles, since they could be seen as proof of his status, or whether he was simply desperate to use any factor remotely plausible as such proof, arises.

38 manner. Once the scholar asked him what his name was, and the young man

answered gravely: Stephanus Dames.91

What is even more peculiar is the fact that Cardano’s own father came to him

in a dream:

Secundum, ibidem non multo post moranti: videbatur mihi quod anima mea esset in Coelo Lunae, nuda a corpore, et solitaria, et ob id quaerebar, audivi vocem patris mei dicentis Datus sum tibi custos a Deo ... Id ego sic interpretatus sum, Patris anima tutelaris spiritus, quid amicius aut iucundius.92

The attitude of Cardano (and his contemporaries also) to the question of such

intermediaries is more than ambiguous; it is inconsistent in a way that one might pose

the question whether Cardano had any system underlying his scattered ideas on

transcendent beings at all. I shall not answer this question now, because a thorough

analysis of his scientific works is needed, which I will provide in the chapter that

follows. Nevertheless, we can suspect on the basis of what has been said so far that in

the figure of Cardano we are not dealing with a scholar who had been building up an

ideological system step by step, work by work, but most probably someone who was

led by his various interests and curiosity in far too many ways.

He was a much-feared foe in scholarly debates, but he denies confidently and

vehemently the rumours that his aptitude and ability in those discussions was due to a

91 “Visus sum etiam aliquando invenem mihi bladientem agnoscere, cuius tamen experectus minime memini, quem cum interrogassem quis esset, et cuias, gravate respondit Stephanus Dames: Non fert lingua Latina aliter explicari quam aliena sonet. Ego saepius cogitavi de hoc, στέφανος coronam

CEU eTD Collection significat μέσος media, medietasve,” Cardano, De propria vita, XXXVII, 29. The author’s explanation is again a good example of his accentuation of his uniqueness. Instead of a well-known angel, the one appearing to Cardano is an undefined, unknown visitor, whose name is the only key to his being. Etymologically, Stephanus means – in Cardano’s understanding of the words - a kind of crown, while Dames stands for ‘middle’ or ‘state in between.’ The latter element is more interesting for us, since here we deal with the different intermediaries Cardano claimed to have, and his translation of Dames is exactly a being in between, an intermediary. 92 Ibid., XXXVII, 29. In comparison I would like to quote Tommaso Campanella, who had the habit of hearing a warning voice: “Ma io, sempre che ho da patir qualche cosa, mi sento tra il sonno e la vigilia un che mi chiama: - Campanella -, chiaramente, e ogni poco lo provo e sto attento, e non so chi sia, e se non è angelo o demonio, bisogna che sia l’aria turbata dalla mia passion futura, o infatta da chi me la

39 certain daimon.93 This is – in my opinion – a conscious step in building up the image

of the self, designed to present an image of a very intelligent scientist who fought his

way up to the zenith of his career unaided, using nothing but the capacities of his

mind. Despite his ironical comment on the simplicity of his adversaries, later he

states that Spiritus affidentes, aut praesidentes ... favisse quibusdam viris pro

constanti, ut dixi receptum est. Socrati, Plotino, Synesio, Dioni, Fl. Iosepho, sed et

mihi.94

The liminal status, so characteristic of the melancholic, leads to a kind of

separation from the rest of the society or community: this explains why the chosen

ones are often lonely. This loneliness can be the result of a conscious choice, but it

might also derive from the character of the melancholic. In the first case we can say

that the choice is a voluntary and proud isolation from others, who do not know what

the gifted ones (to whom a higher knowledge and insight in the secrets of nature is

given) do. Solitudine potius quam sociis, quoniam paucissimi non improbi, nulli vere

docti,95 reports Cardano, and this statement places him in the company of the

consciously lonesome men. He avoided the company of others, because they were

not highly cultivated enough and he could not share his thoughts with them.

However, the situation is not unequivocal in this case, either. Later on he complains,

for instance, that the greatest misfortune in his life was the fact that he did not have

anyone, relative or friend, ready to help him to tide over his hardships, and in

consequence he had to face all his difficulties alone. CEU eTD Collection

prepara.” Opere di Giordano Bruno e Tommaso Campanella, A. Guzzo and R. Amerio, eds. (Milan: Ricciardi, 1956), 1055. 93 “Dignique etiam venia sint, qui ad malum daemonem talia referunt, quando neque bonum, neque Dei benignitatem agnoscunt.” Cardano, De propria vita, XLIV, 39. 94 Ibid., XLVII, 44. 95 Ibid., XVIII, 14. In his autobiography he admits that he was solitary as one could be, although, ha says, he understood that Aristotle condemned that sort of life, because according to the Philosopher's opinion a solitary man was either a beast or a god. See De propria vita, XIII, 10-11.

40 Nevertheless, Cardano argues that all these peculiar phenomena, such as the

daimon, or meaningful and prophetic dreams, do not distinguish him from the others

at all, because they can occur to anyone; on the contrary, they are destined – in his

opinion – to accentuate even more the weaknesses he had compared to the average.

He describes the “real” peculiarities in Chapter XXXVIII. The first one (they are

listed as the miracles were) is a certain ringing in the ears:

Sentio ingredi foris in aurem, rem cum strepitu ex ea parte directe, unde sit sermo de me: et si ad bonum decumbit in latere dextro, aut si a sinistro venit penetrat in dextrum, et sit strepitus ordinatus.96

The second one is the ability of divination by dreams,97 while the third one is a

luminosity that suffused his mind from time to time, providing him with inspiration

and an extreme sharpness of mind.98 The fourth special ability is that any time he

concentrated on God and on his own faith, he reconciled himself to the world. As for

the fifth:

Quintum peculiare fuit, quod et ipsum perpetuo duravit, ut non nisi desperatis rebus emerserim, non nisi florentibus mersus sim, quales triremes in tempestate esse solent, modo ex imo ad suprema, modo ex supremis in vortices, idque tota vita. O quoties conditionem meam adeo miserabilem mecum deflevi: non solum quod omnia pessum issent, et omnis spes salutis sublata foret, sed quod neque res meas cogitatione disponenti ut vellem, invenirem modum evadendi.99

In relation to another particularity, not listed here, but nonetheless attributed

generally to the melancholic, Cardano’s autobiography can serve with a good

example. Schleiner states that “humanists and physicians of the first half of the

CEU eTD Collection sixteenth century… rarely give examples that illustrate what we would consider

96 Ibid., XXXVIII, 30. 97 “Nec velim quemquam opinari, quod haec longius petita sint, aut ex Daemone, aut ex Astris, sed ex Aristotelis oraculo: solum enim, inquit ille prudentum, ac sapientum, esse veram divinationem.” Ibid., XLII, 37. 98 He says that he managed to bring this capacity (“Si non est res divina, certe est perfectissimum opus mortalium.” Ibid., XXXVIII, 30) to perfection in the course of the years. 99 Ibid., XXXVIII, 30.

41 prediction. Usually they cite examples of ‘speaking in tongues’… speaking languages

that were never learned, or of particular insight, again baffling because not achieved

through painstaking study.”100 This statement suggests a changing attitude to the

tradition of melancholy: it is not associated necessarily with the ability of divination,

but rather, any kind of special ability. In the De rerum varietate the reader can find a

passage that tells the story of an Italian who spoke beautiful German although he had

never studied the language, but when a doctor cured him of worms, his proficiency in

the language vanished all of a sudden.101

In his De propria vita Cardano proudly tells the story of his miraculous

acquisition of the Latin language, and he never stops reminding the reader about his

sharp mind, which permitted him the study of various things, often without

painstaking study. I have quoted Cardano’s self-characterisation from the De propria

vita, according to which he was a stutterer (although he attributed it to different

planetary influences). Pseudo-Aristotle says102 that a stutter is a sign of melancholy,

too, since it is a consequence of the fact that the word is not able to keep up with the

thought. The melancholy character in some of the Ancient sources103 was seen as one

provided with an extremely strong imaginative power, and the capacity of affecting it

deliberately: this was an ability which made the reception of veracious dreams

possible for him. This is again present in Cardano’s self-narrative.

The examples taken from Cardano’s De propria vita corroborate the argument

that he built up an image of himself in a very conscious manner, using accounts of CEU eTD Collection

100 Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), 28. 101 The passage, taken from Cardano’s De rerum varietate, VIII, 43, 164, is quoted in Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923-1958) vol. V, 578. 102 Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata Physica, XI, 38. In Aristotle, Problemata Physica. Ruelle, Knöllinger and Klek, eds. (Leipzig, 1929). 103 Aristotle, Etica Eudemia, VIII, 2 (1248a, 40), quoted in Klibansky – Panofsky – Saxl, Saturno e la melanconia, 34.

42 miraculous apparitions and special abilities in order to support his unspoken claim,

according to which, he was a chosen one, especially dear to God, guarded and

protected by transcendent beings, admonished by natural and supernatural portents.

The question Remanent dubitationes cur haec sollicitudo pro me non aliis?104 after all

seems to be useless, and even sacrilegious.

Thus far we have looked at Cardano’s melancholia through the glass of his

autobiography – this is of necessity a highly subjective account. The De propria vita

is not without worth when taken as an early example of the science which was much

later to be known as psychology – is the only writing that provides the reader with an

insight into the most hidden secrets of the self. However, we must now turn towards a

different kind of knowledge, one more objective, since it is less concerned with the

act of, or reasons for, perception, than phenomena perceived.

In the next chapter I intend to analyse the scientific correlatives of the topics

brought up from the De propria vita in connection with melancholy. I shall also try to

answer the question whether there is any difference in the formulation of his ideas

between the scientific treatises (destined to expose his miraculous findings), and the

De propria vita.

CEU eTD Collection

104 Ibid., XLVII, 44.

III. Self-Fashioning through the Scientific Works

I. Introduction

Bearing in mind what Stefano Pittaluga stated105 about the possibility of considering

as autobiography any kind of text in which – supposing the identity between the ‘I’ as

author and the ‘I’ as narrator – the writer becomes protagonist, there may be a link

between Cardano’s (late) explicit self-narrative (the De propria vita) and the implicit

one, that is, the scientific corpus (if we accept the idea that for Cardano, life and work

were so closely interlinked that both became the expression of the ego).106

If in the case of the De propria vita the motivation was clearly definable, first

of all to justify himself and all his prior endeavours in the eyes of contemporaries and

future generations, in relation to his scientific works107 (for the sake of precision I

should call them “all the works except the De propria vita,” since the correct

application of the term “science” to the Renaissance would require a chapter on its

own) we have to try to think in terms of self-advertisement and a slightly different

kind of self-fashioning, too, when the aim of the author was not to make a better

impression on the reader through his peculiar personality, but to impress a prospective

105 Stefano Pittaluga, “L’autobiografia nell’Umanesimo,” L’autobiografia nel Medioevo. Atti del XXXIV convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 12-15 ottobre 1997 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1998), 292. 106 See Fierz: “Only after reaching the end of one’s deliberations does one realize the entire course one’s argument ought to have taken in order to have smoothly arrived at the insight which was

CEU eTD Collection achieved. It is this logical path which is presented to the reader. But Cardano does not write like this; even his philosophical writings are, as it were, biographical in nature.” Markus Fierz, Girolamo Cardano 1501-1576. Physician, Natural Philosopher, Mathematician, Astrologer, and Interpreter of Dreams, tr. by Helga Niman (Basel-Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1983), 57. 107 In the 1663 edition of the complete works of Gerolamo Cardano the editor, Carlo Spon organised the volumes according to the various fields of interest, helping thus the reader in the orientation among the hundreds of writings. Volume I contains treatises related to philology, logic, and moralia, while the second tome includes the naturalia. In the third volume one can find the encyclopedic works, the De rerum varietate and the De subtilitate, while the fourth one involves mathematics, first of all. Volume five is dedicated to the divinatory arts; the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth tomes deal with medicine. The tenth volume includes various treatises, from historia animalium to music.

44 patron in order to find a sponsor for the publication of further works, to build his

scholarly career, and to increase the number of his readers.

Nevertheless, perhaps in a less concise and systematic form, one can still, even

with regard to this first phase of his career, retrace moments of self-consciousness,

self-narrative, and records in the so-called scientific works, of his conviction that he

was someone with prophetic abilities, and even with a mission on earth to disseminate

knowledge for people, or at least those people ready to accept it. In the framework of

this thesis it appears to be impossible to systematically analyse the entire scientific

corpus, since the hundreds of treatises, which fill ten folio volumes, deal with the

most diverse branches of science or fields of interest. In consequence, I will have to

narrow down my study, instead of providing a detailed description of each field of

interest, to singular moments, in which the efforts on the part of Cardano to positively

affect the reader’s attitude towards himself even in supposedly (value-) neutral and

objective works are clearly visible. I expect to find further evidence for my argument

that Cardano always considered himself as one who was gifted, who had a privileged

position among the others.

There are two questions involved here. Firstly, how could the idea of being a

chosen one gain new formulation and expression in a genre, the scientific treatise,

completely different from the autobiography? Secondly – but perhaps logically prior

- what is it exactly that makes the two genres (if we can ever consider them genres on

their own) differ so substantially from each other? Structurally, I shall follow the CEU eTD Collection method applied to the second chapter, that is, to proceed step by step, idea by idea,

inside the conceptual sphere of melancholy: being a chosen one, being gifted with

special abilities (especially in foreseeing the future), being admonished throughout

divine intermediaries (such as indefinable visitors, guardian angels, and daimones),

45 and feeling isolated, solitary, or suffering from mental disturbances. However, the

question here is inverted (at least in linear, sequential, chronological or logical terms):

this is not a question of self-justification in terms of explanation for conclusions

previously reached, but rather a matter of additional authority and rationale for the

choice of paths to be taken and reasons why the reader (be he member of the scholarly

public or potential patron) should trust this particular (in every sense) homo novus.

II. Signs of Being a Chosen One in the Scientific Corpus

1. Miracula and Mirabilia in the Encyclopedic Works

In the so-called scientific corpus there are two works that require separate treatment:

these are the De rerum varietate108 and the De subtilitate,109 two encyclopaedias,

which were written with the purpose of collecting all the information available on the

most peculiar topics, such as interesting inventions, machines, supernatural (or at least

mysterious) phenomena, sirens, demons, and many other curiosities. They were

scholarly one in this case, yet also first of all to satisfy his own curiosity. In fact,

many of the peculiar topics that emerge in the De propria vita as unexplainable,

miraculous things are treated in the encyclopedic works in a much more detailed

manner. Cardano never stops accentuating the importance of experimentum, even

when he fills these volumes with miracula and mirabilia,110 and he stoutly states that

sirens, for instance, do exist since Theodore Gaza and George of Trebizond say so, CEU eTD Collection

108 Cardano, De rerum varietate libri XVII (Avignon, 1558). 109 Cardano, De subtilitate libri XXI (Lyon: Guillome Rouillé, 1558). 110 This subtitle refers to the article of Luisa Simonutti, “Miracula and Mirabilia in alcune opere di Cardano,” M. Baldi and G. Canziani, eds., Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Milano (11-13 dicembre 1997) (Milan: Francoangeli, 1999). Simonutti points out that for Cardano miracula and mirabilia were simply naturalia, “pur risultando straordinarie e rinviando a cause sconosciute, non per questo presuppongono l’intervento di angeli o demoni, al contrario sono proprietà di cui l’uomo può avere esperienza” while Cardano “riserva alla

46 and why would they lie111 (while the reason for his criticism towards Albertus

Magnus is exactly the fact that he was prone to believe anything from hearsay).

They seem to form a separate unit in the whole of the scientific corpus, since

that they appear to be the only instances in which Cardano lets his personal interests

overcome his conscious self-fashioning.112 What is more, the author claims to have

received an admonition in a dream to expose his thoughts in the book De

subtilitate.113 Thus we cannot treat these works as expressions of a wish to pander to

public fancy; their genesis lies in something other than market forces – and yet their

rationale coincide with such quotidian demands: publication, publishing, propagation,

all serve a purpose both public and private, both overt and occult.114

2. Cardano’s Melancholy

Despite the great amount of his scientific treatises which have come down to us, there

is no work dedicated exclusively to the question of melancholy as the humour of the

chosen one. Cardano, who liked to style himself officially as a physician, was

interested basically in the physiological – rather than psychological, or spiritual –

aspects of the excess of black bile.

divinità la possibilità logica di compiere “vera miracula”, ossia di modificare il corso, i moti della natura.” Simonutti, 196, 198. 111 Cardano, De rerum varietate, VII, 38. 112 As Maclean formulates it, “the De subtilitate allies itself to some degree with the genre of occult writing... On the one hand they claim to open up a hidden universe to the uninitiated; on the other, they protect this hidden universe from the eyes of the vulgar by a number of expressive and argumentative plays.” Ian Maclean, “The Interpretation of Natural Signs: Cardano’s De Subtilitate versus Scaliger’s

CEU eTD Collection Exercitationes,” in Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 234-235. 113 Cardano, De libris propriis, Opera omnia I, 108. 114 These two works (among many others, except the treatises on medicine) were put on the Index in the year 1571, since errors of faith were found in them. In fact the Holy Congregation ordered the inquisitor of Bologna (where Cardano stayed at the moment) to force the scholar to abjure and prohibit his books, especially the De rerum varietate. The encyclopedic works in which there one could see “il gusto dell’occulto, del segreto e del misterioso mescolandosi, magari, a osservazioni ed esperienze di indiscutibile valore” reflect the effort to reconcile magia naturalis and religious orthodoxy. See Cesare Vasoli, Profezia e regione. Studi sulla cultura del Cinquecento e del Seicento (Naples: Morano, 1974), 473.

47 There are only a few exceptions that I found during my research: one is the

sentence I quoted at the end of the first chapter, that is, Quod melancholici futura

praevideant, innumeris confirmatur exemplis,115 and the other is a reference to

(pseudo-) Aristotle, Quin etiam illud ei respondet quod Philosophus ait, et quotidie

experimentum docet, sapientes plerumque esse melancholicos.116 Is it, then, an

acceptable hypothesis that Cardano, so deeply involved in every kind of divination,

was simply not interested in the tradition of a nexus between melancholy, genius and

divination? My answer is a definite no: one has to search for the explanation, making

recurrent overviews of context and background, in order to understand the

circumstances to which a Renaissance scholar had to adapt himself. There may well

be a discrepancy between the image put forth in the later autobiographical work and

that in the “scientific” corpus, in which Cardano had, volens nolens, to accommodate

himself to the demands of the age. My aim in this chapter is to give the main features

of the complexity of the factors which determined Cardano’s attitude to some

scientific questions, so much so that in certain cases we might suspect that what we

read in a treatise does not exactly correspond to what the author’s conviction was.

This is all only indirect evidence of his being a melancholy character, if not

mere coincidence. In the so-called scientific works the reader cannot encounter

passages stating clearly or proudly that he was one. The quotation taken from the

Paralipomena is not elaborated into an argument on melancholic divination; it stays

on the level of a simple note, one that the author does not intend to pursue further in CEU eTD Collection the direction that we would like to study in this paper. What the reader finds there is a

very serious scientific, more precisely medical, approach to the problem; in

consequence there is no direct answer to the question of whether he was conscious

115 Cardano, Paralipomenon, Opera omnia X, 462.

48 about the complexity of a nexus between melancholy, genius and divination, and

whether he considered himself a melancholic.

3. Divination and Self-Fashioning

The so-called divinatory arts, such as astrology,117 chiromancy, metoposcopy, and

interpretation of dreams, despite the very ambiguous attitude on the part of scholars

throughout the centuries,118 still enjoyed a great popularity in the age of Cardano. He

was a devoted and acknowledged practitioner and defender of astrology and dream-

interpretation. However, he insisted that in order for one to be able to practise it at a

high level, one should learn the art very profoundly, although he admitted that a

natural disposition was also of great importance.119 He never seemed to lose his faith

in his own capacities, not even when a prophecy turned out to be wrong:120 in these

cases he usually put the blame on the inaccuracy of the data which the commissioner

made available for him.

The role of Cardano’s works on astrology is of particular interest from the

point of view of this research, since it shows “the lifelong effort to understand and

explicate his own experiences, and a systematic demonstration of the unique powers

of analysis and prediction that he had dedicated his life to developing.”121

116 Cardano, Theonoston, Opera omnia II, 424. 117 On Cardano’s understanding of astrology, see Jeržy Ochman, “Il determinismo astrologico di Girolamo Cardano,” in Magia, astrologia e religione nel Rinascimento. Convegno polacco-italiano (Varsavia: 25-27 settembre 1972) (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1974), 123-130. 118 A good example for the ambivalence in the evaluation of these “arts” is the Disputationes adversus

CEU eTD Collection astrologiam divinatricem of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Florence, 1496). 119 The question of whether he saw himself as one perfectly disposed to the interpretation of future events by reading the stars or explaining dreams is beyond doubt. In the previous chapter I quoted a passage on the astrological circumstances at the moment of his birth, and that he attributed his ability to foresee the future to the conjunction of the dominant planet, Venus, and the planet in the ascendant, Jupiter. 120 A well-known case was that of King Edward VI of England, for whom Cardano prophesied a long life, albeit one with many difficulties, while not much later the young king, who suffered from a very weak constitution, died. 121 Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos. The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 180.

49 Furthermore, it was the genre of geniture (the standard form of a geniture was a

mosaic-like format,122 a two-dimensional, schematic rendering of the three-

dimensional configuration assumed by the planets at the moment of the client’s birth)

that the De propria vita emerged from, because astrology “offered a means of

understanding one’s own character – and not allowing it to become one’s destiny.”123

Thus Grafton argues that the astrological works, the great number of genitures and

prognostications Cardano cast in the course of his life did not simply contribute with

some autobiographical information to a more precise image of their author, but in

many cases they proved to be much franker and more straightforward than the later

autobiography itself. What could the explanation for this be? Following the train of

thoughts of Grafton we can see that “Cardano had deliberately broken the normal

rules of literary self-presentation – the rules that the prudent writer would follow in all

cases,” because he liked to play “the hero of science,”124 who exposed himself

completely to the reader in order that they could learn from him, from his mistakes,

thus subscribing to the moralising aspect of astrology.125

From the beginning of his scientific career Cardano cast himself in the very

engaging character of the prophet.126 He was aware of the call of readers for

prophecies concerning political, economic and social issues, and he understood that

an adept intellectual could profit by a pamphlet full of predictions about the short and

122 Grafton states that this mosaic-like format of the commentary on a horoscope proved the ideal mirror for Cardano’s fractured soul. Ibid., 198. 123

CEU eTD Collection “The good astrologer – like the good biographer – promised to teach his disciples to read, and even to rewrite, the book of human character itself.” Ibid., 194. 124 “If I am silent, what use will be to students of the discipline? Let love of truth and public utility win out!” Cardano, Liber xii geniturarum, Opera omnia, V, 523, tr. and quoted by Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 191. 125 Cardano states in fact that “Alia enim est naturalis affectio, alia studiorum et disciplinae, qua mores uniuscuisusque instituuntur.” Cardano, Liber xii geniturarum, Opera omnia V, 523. 126 Even if in his autobiography he complained that his enemies (we have learned from the analysis of the De vita propria that Cardano had many of them) “afferebant quoque nativitatum fasciculos, ut de his pronunciarem, tanquam ariolus et vates, non ut medicinae professor, ” De vita propria, Opera omnia I, XXXIX, 31. Grafton states that “He adopted an assertive, dogmatic tone – more that of the

50 the long term. Thus he produced the Pronostico,127 a rather equivocal and still,

noteworthy debut in the scientific world.128 He also knew how to sell his literary

products: for example he brought into the realm of print materials previously excluded

from it,129 he chose very prudently the addressees of his books – among them we can

find cardinals and popes (and we may recall here his concern to mollify the church

authorities, since he was in danger of persecution as well as the prohibition which he

indeed suffered). Indeed, Cardano was conscious about the cut-throat competition

between astrologers, and he tried everything to fashion himself in such a way that he

could survive; thus he made a constant and effective advertisement for himself.130 He

evaluated his own works from time to time, which testifies to the fact that he was

conscious of the evolution of his scientific performance. He excluded, for instance,

his first astrological work, the Pronostico from the list of his books.131 This suggests

that he did not find it scholarly enough later on, but it also suggests that he saw it as

less than attractive to the reading public (scholarly or otherwise) and thus refashioned

himself in a way which obviated potential objections to earlier expositions of his

thought.

prophet who had a direct link to a divine source than that of the astrologer to take all the facts into accounts,” in Cardano’s Cosmos, 94. 127

CEU eTD Collection Cardano, Pronostico, Germana Ernst, ed. In M. Baldi and G. Canziani, eds. Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Milano (11-13 dicembre 1997) (Milan: Francoangeli, 1999). 128 Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 38. 129 Ibid., 71. 130 He was able to change the tone of his writings so much so that later he managed to win the attention and recognition of Lutheran circles as well. This is to be seen as a very conscious (and successful) attempt to conquer new segments of the market for himself. 131 On the interpretation of the lists of his own books, see Ian Maclean, “Interpreting the De libris propriis,” in M. Baldi and G. Canziani, eds., Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Milano (11-13 Dicembre 1997) (Milan: Francoangeli, 1999).

51 4. Dreams and Demons

Astrology was Cardano’s profession, but dream-interpretation132 was his real delight,

as is proven by the great number of dreams that the author brought up as examples for

divine providence in his non-scientific writing, the De propria vita.

The vast book entitled Synesiorum somniorum libri IIII133 was dedicated

exclusively to dreams, their classification, their origins: in content it is heavily and

proudly indebted to the De insomniis of Synesius134 (as the title of the work suggests),

and to Artemidorus Daldianus.135 Similarly to Galen,136 whom Cardano followed and

criticised with the same vehemence, he acknowledged divinatory dreams sent from

the god(s); indeed, this is the category which Cardano considered to be the most

noteworthy.

We have seen several examples taken from the De propria vita of prophetic

dreams, and the reader can encounter many more of them scattered throughout the

132 Dreams and their interpretation have always been at the centre of attention; consequently there is a great amount of literature, both primary and secondary, which has come down to us. Concerning Antiquity in general, see first of all the book of Patricia Cox Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity. Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); the article of Steven M. Oberhelman, “Dreams in Graeco-Roman Medicine,” in Wolfgang Haase, ed. Aufstieg und Nierdergang der Römischen Welt, II Principat 37.1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), and Kessels, “Ancient Systems of Dream-Classification,” Mnemosyne ser. 4, 22, (1969): 389-424. On Synesius, who was one of the sources of Cardano’s dream-theory, see Christian Lacombrade, Synesios de Cyrène, hellène et chrètien (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1951), especially pages 150-169. Another important predecessor of Cardano in dream-interpretation was Artemidorus Daldianus; on his dream-book see Dario Del Corno, “C’è del metodo in questa follia: Artemidoro,” in Il sogno in Grecia, Giulio Guidorizzi, ed. (Rome: Laterza, 1988) 147-159, and Hans Bender, “Predizione e simbolo in Artemidoro alla luce della moderna psicologia del sogno,” in Il sogno in Grecia, 161-171. Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) provides a detailed description of medieval dream-interpretation, while on the Renaissance tradition of dream-divination see Marina Beer, “Sognare a corte,” in L’ozio onorato: saggi sulla cultura letteraria italiana del Rinascimento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1996); Richard L. Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-

CEU eTD Collection Century Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 133 It was first published in the year 1562, in Basle. 134 On Synesius see Jay Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, Philosopher-bishop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) and Christian Lacombrade, Synesios de Cyrène, Hellène et Chrètien (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1951). 135 A detailed analysis of the sources of Cardano’s dream-classification is available by Alice Lavinia Brown, “Girolamo Cardano’s Somniorum Synesiorum Libri IIII,” in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance (1979): 41. The Oneirocritica of Artemidorus was first published in 1518, in Venice, together with the De somniis of Synesius, which was later translated into Latin in 1539. 136 Steven M. Oberhelman, “Dreams in Graeco-Roman Medicine,” in Wolfgang Haase, ed. Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II Principat 37.1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980).

52 scientific treatises too. The dream for Cardano is always a manifestation of divine

providence (which, however, remains a reflection of natural order and not that of the

supernatural), such a complex phenomenon that the human mind has to limit itself to

generalities when trying to perceive it.137 This attitude to dreams is similar in a

contemporary of Cardano, Giambattista Della Porta,138 because they both believed

that there were rules of sympathy between dreams and the natural world, and in

consequence, that one possessing the appropriate means139 and skills to do so could

affect the formal aspects of his dreams. In fact, in the Synesiorum somniorum we can

find a detailed description of the effects that various foods have on the dreamer:

...si quis in prandio edat sanguinem nigrae ovis, aut agnae, cum sale, dormieritque paulo post in pellibus nuper mactatae eiusdem atque aliarum furvarum pecudum, nondum bene siccatis, somnia vedebit terribilia.140

In relation to dreams as well we can see the reflection of the proud

Renaissance attitude that placed man, the dreamer, at the centre of the universe, being

just another level on which divine nature reveals and exhibits itself. Cardano

definitely subscribed to this idea when he specified three reasons for the creation of

man: (1) to know God, (2) to function as an intermediary between heaven and earth,

(3) to rule earthly things.141 Even if dreams seem to have a purely natural cause, the

prophetic, revelatory type of them needs a very cautious interpretation. (After all, it is

God who reveals himself through nature.)

137 Francesco Gandolfo, Il “dolce tempo.” Mistica, ermetismo e sogno nel Cinquecento (Rome:

CEU eTD Collection Bulzoni, 1978), 282. In contrast to the Neoplatonic, or Averroist understanding of dreams, indeed, which traces them back to a supernatural cause, Cardano shows his infinite belief in divine providence which – he argues – makes possible to the mind the exploration of his “secrets” simply through the profound study of nature. “La “magia” di Cardano definisce con questo la sua più sostanziale distinzione rispetto alla prospettiva neoplatonica del sogno come estasi liberatoria, termine finale di un processo ascetico di rigenerazione spirituale.” Gandolfo, Il “dolce tempo,” 282. 138 Giambattista Della Porta, Magia naturalis (Naples, 1589) and Phytognomonica (Frankfurt, 1608). On Della Porta, see Luisa Muraro, Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978). 139 By taking care of diet and the balance of humours, for instance. 140 Cardano, Synesiorum somniorum libri IIII, Opera omnia V, 682.

53 This is the point where the figure of a chosen one with special abilities (in this

case that of the ability to interpret dreams in general, and dreams of divine origin in

particular) seems to be instantiated again by Cardano, and in a very specifically

scholarly, academic, and indeed professional context he claims to be one of the few

who are qualified enough to understand the message encoded in the somnia: a

profession that is the most divine and most human at the same time, since it is a

mirror of the universe, but also a human narration.142

Here one could use Herophilus’ classification of dreams143 in order to connect

them to my next topic: he divides dreams according to their origin as (1) godsent

dreams, and (2) natural dreams. A “godsent dream” in his definition is one in which a

single dream-figure presents itself, gives a prophecy, advice, or warning; this figure

can be a god or a father-image.144 In my second chapter, dedicated to the analysis of

the De propria vita, I have quoted a passage where Cardano claimed that his guardian

angel was none other than his own father. Even if this statement is rather surprising,

it becomes more acceptable if one takes into account the tone and the context of the

autobiography. More oddly, this motif emerges in some of the scientific works, too.

The passage that follows is of particular interest, for it includes, indeed, it is based

upon, personal testimony, while remaining true to the standards of the time in terms of

attempts at objective (if not quite veridical) reportage. It relates how his father

reported to Cardano the way he would ascend through the divine spheres (after his

death?) and draws his attention to the fact that God was constantly taking care of him: CEU eTD Collection Hieronymus: Quis ergo mortalium miserior? Aut quid agam!

141 This idea is retraceable in many of Cardano’s works, such as the Proxeneta, Theonoston, De subtilitate, De rerum varietate. 142 Agnese Grieco and Mauro Mancia, Introduzione a Sul sogno e sul sognare (Venice: Marsilia, 1991). 143 E. R. Dodds, “Dream-Pattern and Cultural Pattern,” The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 107. 144 Although divine dreams were sent only to the privileged dreamer, kings, while commoners had to be content with the ordinary symbolic dream to be interpreted with dream-books. Ibid., 107.

54 Facius: Quid eiulas stulte? H: Heu quoniam etiam a Demoniis agitor. F: Non ego Daemon, sed amicus et amicorum optimus. Pater tuus olim et nunc sordido (ut scis) iam diu corporis velo exutus, Facius Cardanus. H: Omittam quae dum solum me esse putarem (nam non magis quam olim, eo somnio te video) audisse reor id maximum, ut nec hic manere nec recedere possum. F: Opportune meministi eius somnii: nam si recte animadvertis nunc tempus est quo ad lunae coelum pervenisti.145 (...) F: Sane hic ergo dies pridie Nonas Aprilia anni MDLXXIV. Pro primo tibi ac quasi natali computandus est. Vides quomodo ex lunari orbe a singulis ad supremum ascenderit. Gaude ergo quod interpretationem nactus sis somnii: et quod tempus advenit. H: De quo gaudere debeo? F: Quod intelligas quam speciali dono Deus te remuneraverit. Nam ita sit: Quid tam durum aut acerbum pati potuisse, aut in posterum superveinre queat quod non solum sporite sed libenter non subeas, videns quantae curae illi fueris?146

This is a very peculiar game with double intermediaries: one is his dead father,

who is now in possession of a higher knowledge, while the other one is Cardano

himself, the writer of this imaginary-fantastic dialogue, who assumes the role of the

interpreter and communicates his own selectness to the world.147

In fact, Cardano uses an intermediary through which he can express his own

conviction about his being a chosen one. That intermediary is himself an

intermediary, a messenger, since he visits the author to reveal something of great

importance to him. The fact that both Cardano and Bruno found this way to formulate

their ideas concerning their own particularity testifies to their belief that if such an

astonishingly explicit claim was communicated through the figure of someone else

CEU eTD Collection 145 Cardano, Dialogus Hieronymi et Facii Cardani Ipsius Patris, Opera Omnia I, 637. In the Latin text there is a reference to a dream Gerolamo had earlier, and which is reported in his De propria vita, when his father appeared to him in a dream and described to him the celestial spheres. See De propria vita, Opera omnia I, 29. 146 Cardano, Dialogus Hieronymi et Facii Cardani Ipsius Patris, 637. 147 This is a striking parallel to the La Cena de le Ceneri of Giordano Bruno, where the author makes one of the protagonists of the dialogue talk about his spiritual and intellectual greatness, his superiority above the masses: “Or ecco quello ch’ha varcato l’aria, penetrato il cielo, discorse le stelle, trapassati gli margini del mondo, fatte svanir le fantastiche muraglia de le prime, ottave, none, decime ed altre, che vi s’avesser potuto aggiongere, sfere, per relazione di vani matematici e cieco veder di filosofi

55 (such as Teofilo in the La Cena de le Ceneri of Bruno, and Fazio Cardano for

Gerolamo) it could appear less presumptuous in the eyes of the readers. It is entrusted

to the taste of every single reader whether he or she finds the claim expressed in this

manner more convincing and trustworthy than it would be if announced unreservedly.

However, one should be careful here: no hint of cynical manipulation of the

readership is necessarily implied. Perhaps one of the most extraordinary aspects of

Cardano’s writings is that he appears, genuinely and sincerely, to make no distinction

between the truly scientific (in the veridical sense) and the anecdotal: he reports all

that occurs to him.

III. Conclusion

As I pointed out earlier, in relation to Cardano’s activity as astrologer, we have to

bear in mind that the so-called scientific works were written in various periods of the

author’s career, without the organic and systematic nature that characterises the De

propria vita. The various treatises undoubtedly reflect an evolution of the author’s

ideas, especially taking into consideration the efforts on his part to fashion himself

and his works into an up-to-date scientific “product.”148

Cardano did not isolate himself hermetically from the outside world: he

always followed with attention the constantly changing pretensions of the market, and

he did his best to satisfy every requirement. He was, however, more than conscious

about the great number of rivals he had to outclass in order to earn a livelihood, and CEU eTD Collection what seemed to be even more important, to perpetuate his name in the scholarly

world.

volgari... ha donati gli occhi a le talpe, illuminati i ciechi.” Giordano Bruno, La Cena de le Ceneri, Augusto Guzzo, ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 22. 148 We know from Cardano’s autobiography that he had the habit of rewriting and revising, and often burning those works he was not satisfied with. See Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 48.

56 In terms of scientific works, in sum, Cardano was, if anything, even more

conscious about his image, since he had to create a very specific image of himself for

the sake of his favourable reception in the scholarly community and market. In

contrast to the old man who, looking back at his past, writes his memoirs in which he

admits to have had special abilities, guardian angels, and a daimon, here Hieronymus

Cardanus physicus Mediolanensis, the scientific scholar, could sense that the world

and science itself were heading for new directions. He understood that superstition

did not have a place in serious works, and he wanted to be acknowledged even if he

had to give up (or at least remain silent about) some of his personal convictions: this

is the reason why we cannot encounter passages stating that Cardano had a daimon,

for instance. What we can find in some of the scientific treatises are endeavours to

describe supernatural phenomena in terms of popular, encyclopedic science, in a very

objective and scholarly way:

Sed et si genius addatur, causa manifestior fiet, videturque hoc verisimilius. Sic totam Platonicorum scholam, Iamblichum, Plotinum, Arrianum, Proclum, Porphyrium; cumque ipso Platone, Aristoteli, atque suis afflectis Theophrasto, Themistro, Alexandro, Averroique concordem reddemus. Unum in utraque opinione commune est, ut Genius sit bonux et verax, animi mores pravi, ut in plerisque ex illustrioribus, qui genium habuisse feruntur: nam qui Genium fallacem et mores pravos habuerunt, omnibus his finis acerbus fuit, quemadmodum Brutus et Cassius, et M. Antonius: at qui bona natura fuere et bono Genio praediti, hi felicissimi fuere.149

Finxere, seu quoniam ex effectibus crediderint veteres, incorporearum substantiarum inferiorum nomina diversa; Daemonem id est sapientem, Cacodaemonem id est pulchrum et propitium sapientem, quem vocamus bonum genium; ut contra. Cacodaemonem malum et infaustum genium. Genium quidem incorporeum cui assistimus, a quo norma vivendi ostenditur.150 CEU eTD Collection

The two encyclopedias, the De subtilitate and the De rerum varietate, which I

have treated separately, are the exceptions to the rule: they constitute the forum where

149 Cardano, Paralipomenon, Opera omnia X, XXI, 471. 150 Ibid., XXIII, 476.

57 Cardano decided to expose his otherwise denied, or at least hidden, interests in magia

naturalis.151 We must not forget, however, that what we today, from more than five

hundred years of distance define as superstition and magic, or supernatural

phenomena in Cardano’s works (dreams, demons, apparitions), for him were all

manifestations of the divine providence, natural portents, since nature is a means of

God of transmitting His will.

CEU eTD Collection

151 We could add two more minor works, the De arcanis aeternitatis and the De fato, although they were less known (and the latter was not even published in the author’s life), because they both are very

Conclusion

In conclusion to the analysis of Gerolamo Cardano’s autobiography and some of the

particular moments in his scientific works, I have sketched out the possibility of

placing him in a tradition which viewed man as being the centre of the universe and

its heir.152 This is nothing new. From Petrarch’s revision of Dante’s (still medieval,

his views on Empire and the vernacular nothwithstanding) worldview to

Shakespeare’s “paragon of animals,” the anthropocentric “Great Chain of Being” was

commonly accepted in Cardano’s time. Yet this new position, adroitly judged, by C.

S. Lewis, inter alia, as being a departure from the medieval conception of man as

outcast, exile, in the peripheries of the cosmos and on the lowest rung of the

ontological ladder, brought with it not only a sense of liberation – and the “Praise of

Folly” which followed – but also a lonely responsibility. From the Italian

Neoplatonist enthusiasm for the Hermetic texts through the re-elaboration and

reshaping of the ancient Greek tradition of melancholy into a complex, yet

ambiguous, network of ideas which involved genius and divination, madness and

mental disturbances, intellectual supremacy and moral deviance, to the sixteenth-

century notion of conscious self-fashioning, more than a century has passed.

In the understanding of man’s role and function it had brought some new

attitudes: the conduct, both personal and professional, of Cardano has served in this

paper as a case study for the interaction of various requirements (either internal or CEU eTD Collection

much involved in magia naturalis. 152 Paracelsus’ view of the dignity and capacities of man is summarised by Webster in the following way: “Man was cast in the image of God; he was the centre part of creation, the summation of all the elements in the macrocosm. His status was so high and great that he is provided with arcana, mysteria and magnalia without number from the heavens. As God’s legitimate heir, the effects of the Fall notwithstanding, man was destined to inherit the kingdom on earth.” In Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton. Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 49.

59 external) that a scientist had to satisfy in order to earn a livelihood and recognition in

the scholarly community.

In connection with a case study a series of questions emerge. All that was

stated on the basis of his works could take the research into two different directions in

this concluding part: being a case study might imply that one’s life and works were

such an organic part of the tradition of his time that we cannot really talk about

dynamism and evolution (as such, parallelism to contemporaries could highlight one’s

characteristics better), while a representative figure of an epoch could also be an

example for progress (and thus we should indicate the points where he differs from

his fellow scholars and his scientific background). The difference between the two

approaches is obviously striking, while we cannot exclude the possibility of the

coexistence of the two interpretations.

Before describing Cardano as belonging to the one or the other category, a

brief overview of the context, and an evaluation of his activity in general, and his

reception or rejection in particular, is necessary. On the basis of the autobiography

and the numerous elements of self-narrative in the scientific corpus, we could see how

Cardano built up the image of a chosen one of himself, step by step, through the

advertisement of his special abilities, albeit always in a rather implicit manner. He

appears to be quite innovative in this respect: while the Florentine Neoplatonist

philosophers utilised mainly the Hermetic corpus, and – with reservations – the

tradition of melancholy as the sources of their justification for their claims to be CEU eTD Collection chosen ones, Cardano accentuated his particularity even through his independence

from these well-known traditions.

Looking at the scientific, and especially the medical treatises, it becomes clear

that Cardano did not deal seriously with the idea of a nexus between melancholy,

60 genius, and divination, and his attitude to melancholy (despite his notion of its

metaphysical interpretation) remained purely medical. This, in my understanding, is

due to the ambivalent view of this tradition, which did not stimulate anyone (at least

not someone who wanted to be taken seriously in the scientific world) to refer to it as

an authoritative source. This can be applied so much the more in the case of Cardano

who was proudest of the successes he attained in the healing of the sick. Yet, it

seems, most of his contemporaries did not doubt his being a melancholy character;

most probably they discovered the salient correspondences between the features of the

melancholy prototype (which we described in the first chapter) and that of Cardano:

the dedication of Joannes Sambucus in his Emblemata153 is a very good example.

  Ad Hieron. Cardanum

CEU eTD Collection ODERAT hic cunctos nes se nec amabat amicos, nomina digna gerens. Ho vitium et morbus de bili nascitur atra, Anxiat haec, curas suppeditatque graves. Quapropter cecidisse piro, fregisseque crura Fertur, et auxilium non petiisse malo. Suavibus a sociis, et consuctudine dulci

153 Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata (Budapest, 1982, facsimile edition of Antwerp, 1564), 126-127.

61 Qui se subducunt, vulnera saeva ferunt. Conditio haec misera est, tristes suspiria ducunt, Cumque nihil causa est, occubuisse velint. At tu dum poteris noto sociere sodali, Sublevet ut pressum coraque dolore vacet. Quos nulla attingunt prorsus commercia grato Atque sodalitio subsidiisque carent: Aut Dii sunt proprii, aut falsus pervertit inanes Sensus, ut hos stolidos, vanaque cordo putes. Tu verotandem nobis dialectica sponte Donata, in lucem mittito si memores.

Cardano was an eccentric misanthrope, a recluse who led a cloistered life,

especially in his declining years. Even if he was not a conscious and proud

melancholic (simply both proud of his skills and status, and aware of his previous

inclination to melancholy154) he used other means – his works, that which he did

rather than which he was – very efficiently while shaping his identity and stressing his

special status.

The epoch was characterised by an excited and continuous search for the

hidden secrets of nature, as I have pointed out in my introduction. The initiated was

in possession of a higher knowledge, but not everyone could live as well with the

notions acquired: the solitude of the melancholic has thus a parallel in the solitude of

the scholar, because they both were prone to search for answers and explanations

inside themselves, turning away from others, and very often from God in their acedia.

Doctor Cardano’s favourite patient was signor Cardano,155 and the way he was

absorbed in the observation and detailed analysis of his physiological functioning, he

was ready to explain psychological or even supernatural phenomena through his CEU eTD Collection

personal perspective. Many of the contemporaries and future generations for that

154 In his autobiography Cardano, while recounting his “defects,” casually mention that as a young boy he had a melancholy temperament. See Cardano, De propria vita, Opera omnia I, LII, 29. 155 See the article of Ann C. E. Van Galen, “Body and Self-Image in the Autobiography of Gerolamo Cardano,” in Karl Enenkel, ed. Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 133-152.

62 very reason labelled him an atheist:156 it is true that he dedicated his energies to the

understanding of the creatures of God, not that of God Himself. This is nothing

surprising or new in the sixteenth century: all those who were involved in the constant

exploration of nature considered it to be the manifestation of God, and the secrets they

happened to find there (such as the dreams or demons were, for Cardano), were seen

as testimonies to God’s infinite goodness and providence. However, reading those

texts today, one often has the impression that God, being on both sides of the

equation, as it were, may be dropped out of consideration (or “put in brackets,” in

twentieth-century philosophical terms), and thus appears to play quite a minor role in

the speculations of natural science. Indeed, the suspicion arises that for many such

thinkers that lip-service only is being paid, as in the less scientific cases of

Machiavelli and, admittedly later, Hobbes. It was not the fact that he practised natural

philosophy that caused him many troubles or bad reputation and criticism, but the way

he did it. He chose to write in Latin, since writing in vernacular put the author

beyond the range of normal academic discourse, but his Latin was very difficult to

understand for traditionally educated scholars (such as Julius Caesar Scaliger, who

mocked Cardano for this157) who expected to encounter the terminology of Aristotle’s

Organon, that being the model in academic circles.158 Furthermore, Cardano

156 C. W. T. Blackwell, “The Historiography of Renaissance Philosophy and the Creation of the Myth of the Renaissance Eccentric Genius – Naudé through Brucker to Hegel,” in Eckhard Keßler, ed. Girolamo Cardano (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 339-369. In fact, Cardano is included in the following histories of atheism: J. F. Buddeus, Theses theologicae de atheismo et superstitione (Jena, 1717), J. F. Reimman, Historia universalis atheismi (Hildesheim, 1725), while they both came to the

CEU eTD Collection same conclusion: Cardano was superstitious but not an atheist. 157 Julius Caesar Scaliger, Exotericae exercitationes de subtilitate (Frankfurt: Claudius Marnius, 1607). On the philosophical controversy between Cardano and Scaliger see Guido Giglioni, “Girolamo Cardano e Giulio Cesare Scaligero. Il dibattito sul ruolo dell’anima vegetativa,” in M. Baldi and G. Canziani, eds. Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita (Milan: Francoangeli), 313-331; and Ian Maclean, “The Interpretation of Natural Signs: Cardano’s De subtilitate versus Scaliger’s Exerctitationes,” in Brian Vickers, ed. Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 231-252. 158 Kristian Jensen, “Cardanus and his Readers in the Sixteenth Century,” in Eckhard Keßler, ed. Girolamo Cardano, 265-308. Jensen claims that Cardano’s bad Latin was one of the reasons why the encyclopedic works, addressed to the academic world with the intention of filling a gap in scientific

63 repeatedly claimed that no textual authority could oppose conclusions drawn from

experience159 and he also took a position rather contrary to the occult tradition, when

stated that human knowledge was finite. This statement is again something that

makes a clear-cut labelling of his work almost impossible. The strenuous effort with

which Cardano was looking for the secrets of nature with the intention of describing

them in terms of natural science, would easily place him among the many others

involved in magia naturalis and the occult tradition;160 at the same time he appears to

oppose the idea that all things are knowable to the wise.161

This controversy or difficulty in the interpretation of his attitude leads back to

a question posed in the beginning of this thesis: Is there any system underlying his

scattered ideas? Is the confusion that the reader might find here and there in

Cardano’s work, especially after having confronted some contradictory parts, due to

the author’s own inconsistency? So far no researcher has claimed to have found a

coherent ideological system in Cardano’s numerous and most diverse writings

(indeed, he did not found any philosophical school, and had no immediate followers).

literature, became source books of extraordinary events, and what is more, they won attention first of all among students and non-scholarly circles. Jensen’s judgement of Cardano is the following: “He could take part in the initial phases of a scientific revolution, consisting in a critique of the established system of description of the natural world; but he could not push on to the next phase, providing a cohesive alternative which could accommodate facts better than the system he wished to replace… he used old words to mean something new.” Jensen, “Cardanus and his Readers in the Sixteenth Century,” 306. 159 I have pointed out earlier that the category of experience, experimentum, for Cardano included hearsay and things that others have observed before him as well, as happened in the case of the sirens, and that of the demons (In the latter case, for example, it was the testimony of his father that was crucial for him: the fact that Fazio Cardano claimed to have a demon convinced Gerolamo Cardano of

CEU eTD Collection their existence, although he never expressed his belief in the explicitly, except in his autobiography). As Findlen states, “Experience now played a greater role in the constitution of scientific authority, and the naturalists who claimed the greatest level of “experience” subsequently came to possess the highest degree of knowledge.” Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 157. 160 See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994): “For seventeenth-century naturalists, knowledge of nature increasingly signified power over nature. Constantly critiquing Renaissance natural magic for being overly speculative in its claims to perform extravagant and unheralded experiments, they nonetheless drew inspiration from these activities.” Findlen, Possessing Nature, 54.

64 It is, however, much clearer what he was aiming at. He took part in a movement that

intended to reform knowledge through an attempt at synthesising some of the major

traditions of the European culture, such as the Aristotelian and the Humanist

traditions. Apart from the synthesis of respected old traditions, the goal of their

activity was to reach to something new and revolutionary. The stress put on the

importance of experience reflects this conscious effort and indeed the understanding

of its essential role in science (even if both the words “experience” and “science”

meant something rather different for them) can be considered as a decisive step

towards rational science hallmarked traditionally by the name of Descartes, whose

contemporary, Leibniz, noted Cardano’s worth in the quote given in the introduction.

In this respect we can acknowledge the scientific activity of Gerolamo

Cardano as contributing to the birth of modern science; the restrictions we have to

bear in mind are clear now. There are no real restrictions, however, when it is his

merit as a mathematician under examination, since it is a fact that he was the first

scholar who managed to demonstrate the formula of cubic equations.162 There were,

furthermore, a number of genial observations he made in the field of medicine,163 and

also some of his inventions164 proved to be long lasting.

His manifold interests, the numerous difficulties he had to face as a scholar

and even more as a private individual (we must not forget Cardano’s social

background: he was not born to a rich noble family, he did not enjoy the numerous

advantages that solid background could have provided) of and the eager search for CEU eTD Collection

161 In his De arcanis aeternitatis, Opera omnia X, he classifies three types of sources of knowledge: (1) intuition or innate ideas, (2) senses and reason, and (3) ecstasy. 162 On Cardano’s contribution to mathematics, see Silvio Maracchia, Da Cardano a Galois – Momenti di storia dell’algebra (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), especially pages 17-57. 163 The most recent and most detailed analysis of Cardano’s medicine is in Nancy G. Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror. Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 164 The so-called “joint of Cardan,” for example. On this invention see Berthold Laufer, Cardan’s Suspension in China (Washington, 1916).

65 knowledge dissipated his energies: this is the reason why his figure is still seen as

very controversial, despite his indisputable merits in many of the fields of knowledge

he was engaged in. He, similarly to many of his contemporaries, wanted to grasp too

much, although it would be very unjust to say that he held too little. “Little” is hardly

applicable to the quantity of his writings: the ten folio volumes (not considering the

works that he himself destroyed or the ones that might be lost) are the fruit of his

infinite curiosity and the need to record everything he observed, the things around and

inside him.

The intertwining of life (both physiological and psychological) and work to

such an extent is a particular feature of Cardano. In the world of artists one can

encounter similar phenomena: also Benvenuto Cellini, in his Vita, gives evidence of a

shameless self-confidence,165 and his many adventures testify to the fact that he did

not make a distinction between his private life, emotions, personal preferences and

work. Yet Cardano’s attitude is unique in many respects: the autobiography’s

importance is beyond doubt, but, had it not been preserved throughout the centuries,

we still would know plenty of things about his life from the so-called scientific

corpus, and what is more peculiar, about his feelings, his conduct in a scholarly

ambience and in the circle of his family.

Cardano’s case is by no means the best-known among his contemporaries, to

say nothing of his predecessors and successors in these Renaissance endeavours, those

savants, half medic and half mystic, who are celebrated today. Yet perhaps this is to CEU eTD Collection his credit – he has no ill fame of the like which is accorded to Paracelsus, or Dee and

Kelley. Accusation of heresy may have some validity in the context of his time, and

accusations of naiveté or histrionic self-obsession may have some currency in the

66 context of ours, but accusations of malice or duplicity or fraud will not stand up.

Whatever else Cardano was, he was sincere. Only some reservations need be made

with regard to his eagerness to seize upon any evidence of his elect status, be they

wayward progeny or the planet ruling over him (Venus, not Saturn, which both raises

and begs certain questions). If he was hungry for recognition, he was not greedy for

anything else – no alchemist in the Kelley mould he. Despite his fascination with

himself as self, he maintains a (pre- or proto-) scientific objectivity in medical matters

as they were understood to him. Thus we can understand Leibniz’s estimation:

Cardano was indeed great, but working within a confused tradition, and with limited

tools of analysis and data (save in pure mathematics, where mental effort and

conceptual reasoning sufficed and prevailed, without being sullied by contact with the

surly bonds of quotidian personal experience).

As an exception, however, he found room in his library for the celebrated twenty-two volumes De subtilitate, and for some anti-peripatetic work of Cardano’s, in consideration of his knowledge of astrology; for he would say that anyone who could write the treatise De restitutione temporum et motuum coelestium and the book Duodecim geniturarum was worth listenting to, even when he erred; and that the man’s great defect was having too much talent; and that no one could guess where he might have got to, even in philosophy, if he had always kept to the right road.166

Cardano’s work is far from being completely explored. There are further avenues of

research, especially in the form of more profound parallels with contemporaries, such

as Giambattista Della Porta, who, in imitation of Cardano, styled himself a “man of

165

CEU eTD Collection Similarly to Cardano, Cellini, himself a melancholic, felt that he was always protected and guided by divine providence. In The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, J. A. Symonds, ed. (New York: Modern Library, s. a.). 166 “Per eccezione però, dava (Don Ferrante) luogo nella sua libreria a que’ celebri ventidue libri De subtilitate, e a qualche altr’opera antiperipatetica del Cardano, in grazia del suo valore in astrologia; dicendo che chii aveva potuto scrivere il trattato de restitutione temporum et motuum coelestium, e il libro Duodecim geniturarum, meritava d’essere ascoltato, anche quando spropositava; e che il gran difetto di quell’uomo era stato d’aver troppo ingegno; e che nessuno si può immaginare dove sarebbe arrivato, anche in filosofia, se fosse stato sempre nella strada retta.” Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1985); in English The Betrothed, tr. by Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Dutton, 1961), 419.

67 inventions,” and claimed to be a magus capable of exceeding anything done by the

ancients.167 While this parallel would lead us backwards compared to the position

Cardano’s work occupies in the history of science (if we accept that rational science is

a higher level than natural philosophy) to the magia naturalis, a different parallel

could direct us towards even more exciting research: that is, a comparison with the

self-awareness of the great French essayist, Michel de Montaigne.

There are several similarities and numerous diversities between the two

authors and the two works: Montaigne was not much older than Cardano; yet what he

represents is a much more critical attitude to the same sources, a step further towards

rationalism and criticism. What these two philosophers share is the immense

curiosity for the outside world, and what is more, “We find self-awareness in the

Renaissance… but Montaigne outstripped them all. He looked into himself and found

things strange and monstrous.”168 Montaigne “had a melancholy element in his

complexion which encouraged him to take all forms of ecstasy and mania very

seriously”; nevertheless the position he took was different: he was “the heir to the best

part of a century of criticism of such doctrines. The Essays show that he rejected a

great deal of what Ficino and the others stood for; what he kept he hedged about with

caveats and provisos.”169 They both entertained manifold interests, and in both the

works (in the case of Cardano the whole corpus, while in Montaigne’s the statement is

true basically for the Essays) it is very difficult to find a system.170 The latter’s

167

CEU eTD Collection See Findlen, “Cardano was an inventor because he repeatedly established first knowledge on a variety of different subjects. This was the model that Della Porta strove to emulate when he surrounded himself with the various technologies that completed his identity as a magus,” in Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature, 324. 168 M. A. Screech, Montaigne & Melancholy. The Wisdom of the Essays. (London: Duckworth, 1983), xi. “I have no more made my book than my book has made me, a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. and ed. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), v. 169 Screech, Montaigne & Melancholy, xi-xii. 170 The Essays do not treat such matters systematically. The pleasure to be found in them depends partly on their apparent lack of order – a feature sometimes artistically contrived but also attributable to

68 criticism indicates the path which Cardano took, the path that was supposed to lead to

experience; however, while Cardano agreed to identify the “Anthropofagi” with

cannibals, “Montaigne did not accept such notions, he did his best to find out what

cannibals were really like by reading and inquiry.”171

The comparison of these two excellent figures of the late Renaissance, through

the misconceptions of the one and the scepticism172 of the other, could help to

perceive what the nature of change (that most of the contemporaries were aware of

but could not define) in the understanding of “science” and “nature,” or man’s role in

the universe was in the course of the sixteenth century.

CEU eTD Collection the various layers of text which the reader is confronted. Montaigne may return to the same topic in widely different places or, more confusingly, on the same page at widely different dates. That is because the Essays are not a work expounding an established doctrine; they lead us along the criss- cross paths of a journey of discovery. Montaigne set out to discover himself. What he discovered was the human race,” Screech, Montaigne & Melancholy, xii. 171 Ibid., 3. 172 “Socrates, Plato or anybody else may teach us something as men, but nothing at all infallibly, so that we must not take them for God’s mouthpiece. If we are to find infallible guidance, we have to turn away from Man to God or his Church,” Ibid., xiii.

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